Shelter “is about more than four walls and a roof; it is also about providing security, safety and protection.” That line, from the foreword of a guide the Inter-Agency Standing Committee published in 2015, sets out the document’s central premise directly: how a shelter is sited, lit and built can raise or lower the risk of gender-based violence for the people living inside it.
Why shelter design is treated as GBV prevention
The guide, titled Shelter, Settlement and Recovery, is one Thematic Area excerpt from a much larger set of guidelines covering 13 separate areas of humanitarian operations, including camp coordination, health, nutrition, education, and water and sanitation. Its own section names several specific risk factors directly: overcrowding, a lack of privacy or working locks, insufficient lighting, inadequate distribution of basic supplies, and shelters built in unsafe locations. Each of those, the guide argues, can raise the risk of domestic violence, sexual assault, harassment or exploitation, with women and girls facing the largest share of that risk in most documented settings.
The guidance sets out three overarching goals for the sector: reducing GBV risk through concrete prevention and mitigation steps from the earliest stage of an emergency through to recovery; promoting resilience by strengthening local and community systems so survivors can access support; and aiding recovery by building lasting local and national capacity to address GBV over the longer term.
Those three goals sit in a deliberate order, moving from immediate safety, to a survivor’s ability to access help, to a community’s longer-term capacity to prevent the problem from recurring after outside agencies eventually scale down their presence. A shelter programme that only addressed the first goal, treating each emergency as a one-time crisis to manage, would miss the guide’s broader argument: that GBV risk reduction has to be built into how local systems function long after the initial response phase ends.
Prevention versus mitigation
The guide draws a distinction worth holding onto, because the two words get used loosely elsewhere. Prevention means stopping gender-based violence from occurring in the first place, through gender-equality programming, or working directly with men and boys on the underlying drivers of violence. Mitigation means something narrower: reducing the risk of exposure to violence that may still occur, through practical steps like identifying reported “hot spots” early, or making sure lighting and security patrols are in place from the very first day a camp or settlement is established, not added later once a problem has already surfaced.
The guide is also careful about which word it uses for the people it is written to protect. It distinguishes “victim,” a term it treats as more common in legal or medical contexts, from “survivor,” which it prefers throughout for its emphasis on resiliency rather than harm alone. That is a small, deliberate choice of language, consistent across the document, and it shapes how the rest of the guidance reads: as programme design aimed at people who are expected to recover, not as a catalogue of harm.
Five stages of the humanitarian programme cycle
The guide’s third and most operational part is structured around the standard humanitarian programme cycle. It walks through GBV-specific considerations at each of five stages: assessment, analysis and planning, including site-safety mapping; resource mobilization; implementation, covering concrete design measures such as adequate lighting, secure locks, and latrine and water-point placement; coordination with other humanitarian sectors, particularly water and sanitation, protection, and camp management; and monitoring and evaluation. Structural recommendations lean on Sphere standards, the widely used humanitarian benchmarks for shelter space, density and distance to water points, and the guide notes that a number of its risk-reduction steps can be implemented without waiting for a full formal assessment to be completed first.
Who wrote it, and what came before
The guide’s lead authors are Jeanne Ward and Julie Lafrenière, with additional support credited to Sarah Coughtry, Samira Sami and Janey Lawry-White. This 2015 edition revised an original set of guidelines from 2005, and the revision process behind it was substantial: input from more than 200 national and international organizations across most world regions, gathered over roughly two years and four global reviews, with field testing involving an estimated 1,000 or more people across nine locations in eight countries.
One detail worth noting sits in the guide’s front matter rather than its technical content. Its foreword is jointly signed by the then Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the then UN High Commissioner for Refugees, a pairing that signals how deliberately this guidance was built to sit across, rather than inside, any single humanitarian agency.
A separate 2019 IASC guide on including people with disabilities in humanitarian action points readers directly to this shelter guidance in its own chapter on shelter and settlements, footnoting it alongside other technical shelter resources when discussing accessible design, wheelchair-accessible latrines, and avoiding steps or narrow entrances in temporary shelters. That cross-reference is a useful signal of how the document functions inside the wider humanitarian-guidance ecosystem: not as a standalone manual read in isolation, but as one piece practitioners are expected to consult alongside guidance from adjacent sectors when planning an actual shelter programme.
The guide remains the version hosted directly by the GBV Guidelines project’s own site today, alongside newer, complementary practical tools for shelter-programme staff that have been published since, without any indication this 2015 edition has itself been formally superseded by a full new revision.