My pragmatic aim has been to add to the body of feminist knowledge on the status and conditions of survivors of violence in shelter homes for “women in distress” (this term is victimizing and disempowering but because it is the Indian State’s expression to refer to a certain type of institution, it is used here in relation to those establishments). Another prominent aim of this action research exercise is to give itself an “afterlife”—that is, to start and sustain empowering programs for survivors of violence and the staff in shelter homes. groups, shelter home staff and residents. I also set some conceptual and what may seem like visionary aims, but we are convinced these must be fundamental to any rights-based work: to undo the stereotype of women experiencing violence and redefine how they are seen and to re-imagine shelter homes as per feminist notions. According to the latest government statistics, the National Crimes Record Bureau’s (NCRB) just-released annual “Crime in India-2018” report, as many as 707 incidents of sexual harassment were reported in 2018 in shelter homes in India – a rise of almost 30% over the 544 such instances reported the previous year.