Women Who Use Drugs Resist Violence in Subtle, Often Overlooked Ways

Women who use drugs are disproportionately subjected to gendered violence that is often normalized and invisible, shaping both their everyday lives in street-based drug environments and their use of harm reduction services. A new qualitative study published in Harm Reduction Journal examines how these women navigate, negotiate, and resist such violence, and how harm reduction services themselves mediate those practices. Using concepts of everyday resistance and an intersectional risk environment framework, the analysis challenges binary views of women as either vulnerable or agentic.

The research drew on 29 interviews with 27 women who use drugs, alongside 170 hours of participant observation conducted at two harm reduction services in Denmark: a gender-neutral drug consumption room and a women-only emergency shelter. This combination of interviews and extended fieldwork allowed the researchers to examine both what women said about violence and how encounters unfolded in the daily rhythm of the services.

The findings show 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. Rather than treating vulnerability and resistance as opposites, the study found they were deeply entangled in women’s lives.

Within these constraints, women employed a range of institutional, spatial, and affective practices. Institutional resistance included both avoidance of 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 for navigating violence, including reading atmospheres, toughening up, and emotional distancing.

A central observation of the study is that these practices were often “messy,” meaning they simultaneously disrupted and reproduced existing power relations and structural inequalities. Women were not simply overcoming violence nor passively enduring it; their strategies could challenge gendered power relations in one moment and reinforce them in the next.

The authors conclude that women who use drugs are not passive victims of gendered violence, but 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. The study’s qualitative design and its focus on two Danish services mean the specific practices described are situated in that context, and the researchers frame their contribution as conceptual rather than as a measurement of violence prevalence.

Harm reduction services, the study argues, play a critical role in mediating both violence and resistance. The gender-neutral consumption room and the women-only shelter offered different possibilities for safety and collective claim-making, illustrating how service design shapes the strategies available to women in street-based drug environments.

The authors suggest that recognizing this ambivalence is essential for developing harm reduction approaches that build safety for women. Published open access on 12 October 2026, the article is being shared early as a peer-reviewed, accepted version that is citable and carries a permanent DOI, with a final version of record to follow.

Subject of Research: How women who use drugs navigate and resist gendered violence in harm reduction settings

Article Title: “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

Article References: Mogensen, S. I. (2026). “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. Harm Reduction Journal. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12954-026-01528-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12954-026-01528-5

Keywords: gendered violence, women who use drugs, harm reduction, drug consumption rooms, qualitative research, Denmark, everyday resistance, risk environment, women-only spaces, participant observation, There, much