Violence against women has always been a key phenomenon for the feminist movements all around the world to expose the dark side of the family, supposedly the place of care and affection. In line with this process was the establishment of women’s shelters, which were designed to be in solidarity with women exposed to violence. The idea of women’s shelters from the activist/feminist perspective has been to replace hierarchical positioning of women in the family by establishing non-hierarchical relations in the shelters and by replacing the idiom of help with that of solidarity. In the meantime, parallel to the rising public awareness, several other ways of organizing women’s shelters have come up in different contexts, that do not necessarily share the original feminist perspective on shelters. In Turkey, partly because of the unwillingness of authorities to allocate funding to autonomous shelters, partly as feminists’ claim that they should not be treated as social workers of the state, the establishing and running of women’s shelters came to be considered as the duty of public authorities (i.e. municipalities and social services of the central state). As a consequence, of the 128 women’s shelters in Turkey today, only 3 belong to NGOs, whereas 33 operate under the municipalities and 92 under the social services. Therefore, it is possible to talk about a regime of public women’s shelters, which we can add as a category to usual classification of women’s shelters under philanthropic, organizational, therapeutic, or activist types. In this paper, based on my fieldwork in public (municipality) shelters, I argue that the familial norms constitute the main organizing principle in the context of public women’s shelters, where building non-hierarchical relationships is, expectedly, not a concern. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in the shelters, I demonstrate that both from the perspectives of the workers and the residents, the women’s shelters are considered as a replacement for natal their families: the state attends to women where their natal families do not. By considering shelters as a family-replacement, the workers and the residents alike create intimacies in an unaccustomed environment, whereas this also brings with it various ways of control that likens public women’s shelters to total institutions (in the sense Goffman uses the term). In this sense, public women’s shelters re-contextualize shelter work in a way that transforms women’s right to public services to a (familial) favor granted by the state.