“There’s not much you can do. You put up with it and bottle it up and take more drugs”: how women who use drugs navigate, negotiate, and resist gendered violence

Women who use drugs are disproportionately subjected to gendered violence, often normalized and invisible, that shapes their everyday lives in street-based drug environments and their use of harm reduction services. While research has documented this, more attention is needed to understand how women experience and respond to violence in harm reduction settings. This study examines how women who use drugs navigate, negotiate, and resist gendered violence, and the role of harm reduction services in shaping these practices. Using concepts of everyday resistance and the intersectional risk environment framework, the analysis challenges binary views of women as either vulnerable or agentic. The study draws on 29 interviews with 27 women who use drugs and 170 h of participant observation conducted at two harm reduction services in Denmark: a gender-neutral drug consumption room and a women-only emergency shelter. Findings reveal that women’s resistance to gendered violence is multifaceted, situated, and often subtle. Participants’ encounters with violence unfolded across structural, symbolic, and everyday levels that overlapped and reinforced each other. Within these constraints, women employed a range of institutional, spatial, and affective practices to navigate, negotiate, and resist violence. Institutional resistance included both avoidance and selective engagement with police and harm reduction staff. Spatial resistance involved avoiding unsafe areas or collectively claiming safer alternatives, such as women-only spaces. Affective practices emerged as embodied strategies to navigate violence, and included reading atmospheres, toughening up, or emotional distancing. These practices were often “messy,” as they simultaneously disrupted and reproduced existing power relations and structural inequalities. Rather than opposites, vulnerability and resistance were deeply entangled in women’s lives. Women who use drugs are not passive victims of gendered violence, but they employ a range of subtle and often overlooked practices to navigate, negotiate, and resist it. These practices operate within, across, and against structural and social constraints, simultaneously challenging and reproducing gendered power relations. Harm reduction services play a critical role in mediating both violence and resistance. Recognizing this ambivalence is essential for developing harm reduction approaches that build safety for women in street-based drug environments.