Domestic violence and poverty: The narratives of homeless women

Frontiers, 1998 by Williams, Jean Calterone

Among the many reasons for homelessness, domestic violence and low-cost housing shortages experienced within a context of poverty are fundamental for lowincome women living in shelters. Women interviewed in homeless and battered women's shelters in Phoenix, Arizona, describe a process of becoming homeless that usually involves a combination of interlocking events and factors, such that it is impossible to isolate one explanation for a woman's homelessness. Nonetheless, women's stories indicate a pattern in their persistent poverty and battering relationships prior to becoming homeless.

Most research distinguishes between the women who live in homeless shelters and those in domestic violence shelters. Likewise, the environments and programs offered by the two types of shelters vary significantly, and shelter staff usually argue that a homeless woman has different issues and needs than a battered woman. This study concurrently analyzes both kinds of shelters and points to the striking similarities in women's reasons for seeking emergency housing whether they reside in domestic violence or homeless shelters. Specifically, women discuss similarly impoverished circumstances and often indicate that their past histories include abusive partners. Partly, the similarity in women's stories can be traced to the overlap in populations at the two types of shelters. A woman who has left an abusive relationship may enter a homeless shelter after spending thirty days at a domestic violence shelter. Shifting to a homeless shelter is in part the effect of battered women's shelter policies, which encourage women to look for other accommodations after thirty days have expired. Other women may go directly from their relationships to homeless shelters because domestic violence shelters are full. Others prefer the attention paid to economic issues or even the generally later curfews found at homeless shelters. The overlap in client populations in the two kinds of shelters and the similarities among women's stories-in particular, the centrality of battering-suggest a complex connection between battering and homelessness. Such a connection is rarely captured by the easy distinctions generally drawn between women who are identified by shelter staff either as battered or homeless.

The distinctions drawn between battered women and homeless women by shelters is reflected in academic and popular literature. Though some homelessness studies address domestic violence as a central concern,1 such violence is more often mentioned only in passing as a reason for women's homelessness, and most studies neither explore its significance for homeless women nor examine the process of becoming homeless as it results from domestic violence. For their part, analyses of domestic violence take more seriously the link between women's financial status and their ability to resist violence,2 but only a few seriously explore homelessness.3

Though much attention has been paid to the "feminization of poverty," there has been less emphasis on the significance of poverty for increasing the likelihood that women will become homeless.4 Female single-parent families rose from 23.7 percent of all families in poverty in 1960 to 52.6 percent of all families in poverty in the mid-1990s.5 According to the 1995 U.S. Conference of Mayor's report on homelessness, the poverty of female-headed families is reflected in the composition of the homeless population. Of the twenty-nine cities surveyed for the report, twenty-three reported that at least 70 percent of homeless families in their cities were single-parent families, with nineteen citing from 80 percent to 98 percent single-parent families,6 the majority of them female headed. As a proportion of the homeless population, families grew from 27 percent in 1985 to 43 percent in 1993 and dropped slightly to 38 percent in 1996.7 Moreover, seventeen of the twenty-four cities that responded to a set of questions from the U.S. Conference of Mayors regarding requests for shelter by families indicated an increase in requests. Some cities reflected as much as a 100 percent increase from 1994 to 1995. As a result of historical growth in women's poverty and female-headed family homelessness, it has become increasingly important for research to focus on the unique sets of issues and problems that women's homelessness presents.

Women interviewed for this study emphasize the impact of divorce, battering, and other family disruptions in combination with economic insecurity and primary responsibility for their children on their paths to homelessness. Notwithstanding the complex story each woman tells when asked what events led her to seek temporary shelter, the combination of persistent poverty, domestic violence, and low-rent housing shortages were most often cited as causing crises. Just as social ethnographers have discovered in interviews with people receiving government assistance,8 most women and their families managed to survive for some time with little income and precarious housing, in other words, in an uncertain financial situation. However, when financial difficulties occurred-problems like a car breakdown that would not cripple a middle-income familythere was no surplus money to finance the unexpected. Many of the women's parents and circle of friends were low-income as well, but had not themselves experienced homelessness. Nevertheless they lacked the resources needed to assist their homeless relatives with substantial amounts of money or long-term housing.