Domestic violence and poverty: The narratives of homeless women

Frontiers, 1998 by Williams, Jean Calterone

Most of the women interviewed came from two fairly small family homeless shelters, The Family Shelter and Lighthouse, and two domestic violence shelters for women and children, Rose's House and Casa Para Las Mujeres (La Casa). These shelters vary in size, housing from five to thirty families. All have cumbersome sets of rules and a significant amount of client and staff contact. In contrast to larger or armory-style homeless shelters, which tend to have fewer caseworkers per client and fewer expectations of residents, the smaller, more tightly controlled shelters offer more privacy and amenities, and fewer clients per caseworker. Although the more comfortable living environment is accompanied by more stringent regulations, these shelters are almost always full and consistently have to turn away people because of a lack of space. Staff at the smaller family homeless shelters tend to accept those who appear most "motivated" or most likely to secure housing within the three months that they are allowed to live at most shelters.l2 This practice usually excludes those who are severely mentally ill and heavy substance users because they are probably least likely to have the ability or desire to obey stricter shelter rules.13

Shelter Organization

As argued above, the interviews completed for this study point to the difficulties in citing the one reason women turn to domestic violence and homeless shelters. But analyses of homelessness often divide shelter residents and other homeless people into groups of those who have lost housing as a result of drug use, mental illness, or the vagaries of the economy. Although categorization is usually offered as the first step in calculating how many people are homeless and why, and how government and private agencies can best respond to them,14 Peter Marcuse criticizes the practice. He argues that it is symptomatic of a reliance on "specialism, or calling a general problem the sum of a number of different special problems."15 Rather than focusing on the systemic structural roots of homelessness, specialism both reflects and encourages a cultural understanding of homelessness as merely a "mental health, substance abuse, or criminal justice problem."16 The tendency of such research to categorize people based on the one reason they lost housing precludes a focus on the process of becoming homeless, on how, for example, domestic violence, drug use, and poverty actually intertwine to lead to homelessness.

Much like analyses of homelessness, each emergency shelter tends to direct its services toward a certain subpopulation of the homeless. Abused and neglected teens, drug addicts, homeless families, and battered women are each assisted in a different program, to the exclusion of others who are similarly without housing. Most shelters do not offer services to women unless they conform to the criteria that ostensibly makes them part of the particular group the shelter program targets. These classifications are delimited by a range of "experiences and characteristics" that do not necessarily match the women's lives who wish to gain entrance into a program. 17 As a result of their reliance on such categories, programs geared toward battered and homeless women vary considerably in the importance given to housing and employment considerations, lifestyle and behavioral issues, and emotional state.