At 26 and the mother of a 15-month-old baby, Nadine Jalil-Rahat has not experienced any form of abuse, but she has seen and heard enough to take action. She has opened Safe Space, a small space with the tagline ‘a community for women’.
While the concept of the store – renting shelves and racks to women to sell their items – is not new, the hope is that it will eventually be expanded into helping women with small loans to start businesses and give assistance to those who suffer from domestic abuse and other forms of violence.
“The reason I started Safe Space is because usually when I am among a group of women and I see their reaction to grievances people have, other women especially, I tend to ask myself if this was me what would these people do for me? And a lot of the time I don’t like the answer, so I decided to create Safe Space,” Jalil-Rahat said in a recent interview with Stabroek Weekend.