In IKEA Portugal’s print ads, the toys cover their eyes. A plush orangutan sits at a child’s table with its hands over its face. A yellow octopus curls a tentacle across its eyes. The children who own them are never shown.
What the Toys Are Hiding From
The series is set in ordinary family homes, with wooden floors, small chairs and toys scattered across the room. The lighting is dim. The children stay outside the frame, and their belongings are the only sign they are there.
The toys act as stand-ins for those children, the people who see and hear domestic violence without being its direct target. The campaign line spells it out, “Violence against women never affects only women.”
The Number Behind the Images
The idea comes from Portugal’s own data. According to the latest report from CIG, the government’s Commission for Citizenship and Gender Equality, more than half the women who arrive at the country’s safe houses bring their children with them.
Earlier figures from the national support network show the same pattern. Between October and December 2022, the network took in 1,504 people. 96% of the adult victims were women, and 51.5% of everyone it sheltered were children who came with their mothers.
How IKEA Answers the Phone
The ads also promote a quieter tool. Anyone who calls IKEA Portugal’s customer support line on +351 21 989 99 45 and selects option 8 is transferred to the Domestic Violence Victim Information Service, where a specialist team handles the call anonymously and confidentially.
In the phone’s call log, it appears as an ordinary call to IKEA. For someone living with an abusive partner, that detail matters as much as the help on the other end.
Why the Calls Are Rising
The line has been running since March 2023, and use is growing. IKEA’s parent company Ingka Group reported more than 1,000 contacts between January and September 2025, more than twice the 2024 figure. Most of the callers were women.
A Partnership Built Over 5 Years
The campaign is the latest step in a relationship between IKEA Portugal and CIG that began with a Pact Against Violence in 2021. In 2022, IKEA gave €15,000 in gift cards to help women furnish new homes and opened a fast track to job interviews for victims. In 2023, alongside the phone line, it set up a €12,000 fund to cover the first rent payments for women leaving shelters.
At that launch, Cláudia Domingues, communications director at IKEA Portugal, said these women, often with their children, “have the right to restart their lives, safely and comfortably.”
Why a Furniture Brand
IKEA sells the idea of home. Its Portuguese team has built this work around a simple position, that a better life starts at home and that home must first be a safe place. Showing children’s toys in a frightening version of that home turns the brand’s own world against the problem.
Agency Uzina created the campaign, with executive creative director Susana Albuquerque, creative director Sérgio Gomes, art director Micael Nunes, copywriter Francisco Carvalho and designer Ema Caetano.
The orangutan and the octopus can cover their eyes. The children in those homes have no such option, and the ads make sure the viewer knows it.
Campaign Name: Violence Against Women Never Affects Only Women
Agency Name: Uzina
Brand Name: IKEA Portugal, with CIG (Commission for Citizenship and Gender Equality)
Location: Portugal (March 2026)
