Em Malos

Women, housing, homelessness and domestic violence

Abstract Many womens lives are still deeply affected by unequal power relationships between men and women and by conventional expectations about domesticity as well as by the actualities of their responsibilities for the care of children and the home in which they live. If women experience violence from a husband or male partner, the violence may be intimately connected with these expectations and realities. If they then have to leave home because of the violence, their problems are compounded by their domesticity and lack of access to financial resources and by the homelessness legislation, which has recently been changed to make its use as a point of entry to permanent accommodation much more restricted. In addition to the violence they have experienced, the loss of home is in itself an element in the complex nature of the trauma that women in a violent relationship suffer. This is compounded further for themselves and their children by the uncertain period they spend waiting for the possibility of rehousing if they leave. The study described in this paper looked at homelessness law in the UK before the passage of the recent Housing Act (1996) in Britain. It does not bear out the supposition that homeless families, including women escaping from domestic violence and their children, were unfairly favoured under the previous legislation. The paper argues that the withdrawal in the new Act of the statutory link between homelessness and a lifeline to permanent housing is an example of the ambivalent and contradictory nature of government policy in relation to families and to the social position of women, and is a potentially disastrous development for many women experiencing domestic violence and for their children.

Domestic violence, social policy and housing

There have been frequent discussions in the pages of Critical Social Policy and elsewhere about what constitutes the family within the context of British social policy (see, for example, Every, 1991/2). Such discussions have identified the ’family’ in which the British government believes as an increasingly mythical affair consisting of a male breadwinner with a dependent wife and biological children, usually white and fairly middle class, and most definitely heterosexual. We know, of course, that such families are no longer the dominant social form in this country. People now live within a wide variety of households and of emotional, economic and sexual relationships. Nevertheless, since 1979, the conservative governments of Thatcher and Major have adopted a particularly strong line in favour of the traditional, nuclear family, initiating in its support a range of often repressive social policies. They have had little large-scale success so far, however, in turning back the clock. To name just two examples, they have been able neither to reverse the changing role of women in society nor the growth of the lesbian and gay movements. The present government, though, is especially strongly committed to pushing family policy ’back to basics’ in a direction which resurrects the traditional family form and the position of men within it as heads of household, responsible for women and children dependents. The Child Support Act and the current, ominous fuss about single parents form part of this policy direction.