Domestic violence and poverty: The narratives of homeless women

Frontiers, 1998 by Williams, Jean Calterone

Two years later, Latanya met her current boyfriend, Emil. After two years together the couple had a son, and she gave up her subsidized housing a year later to move into his home. Over the course of the past year, Latanya left Emil several times and stayed with her sister when he became violent toward her. Finally, she decided to leave him for good and called the shelter: "My sister wanted me to stay with her, but I wanted counseling, so I went to Rose's House." Although she claims that she is not "really" homeless because she has the option of living with her sister, Latanya's sister's husband already works three jobs to support the family, and two or three more people would certainly strain their resources. Moreover, Latanya has applied for subsidized housing again, but she faces a significant delay in obtaining such housing because of a two-year waiting list.

Like Latanya, Betsy describes multiple, interlocking factors that led to her residence first in a domestic violence shelter and then in a homeless shelter. And like Latanya, Betsy does not clearly fall into either the "battered woman" or "homeless woman" categories. A thirty-one-year-old Euro-American woman with three children, Betsy begins the story of how she became homeless when she ran away from home at age fifteen, saying, "I guess I've been homeless from fifteen to twenty-one, but I didn't think of myself that way then." For those six years, Betsy supported herself through sex work and as a relief driver for truckers, riding back and forth across the country with truckers who paid her one cent a mile to drive while they slept. She had to sleep on the streets only twice during those years, but supporting herself through sex work was difficult for her emotionally. Her voice lowers to a whisper and she cries when she talks about it.

For a few years in her early twenties, Betsy worked alternately as a live-in housekeeper and as a cashier in a retail store. She then met her husband and had her first child, who is now four years old. Because the couple had difficulties getting by on the money her husband made at his appliance repair business, they were repeatedly evicted when they were short on rent. In the four years prior to Betsy's arrival at the shelter, they had moved twenty-two times. During the past year, cocaine had played an increasing role in their marriage, and Betsy's husband had become increasingly violent. As the couple became more involved in using drugs, his violence escalated and he grew less interested in and committed to working. Betsy blames him for their homelessness, arguing, "The main reason I'm homeless is that Ron didn't want to work." Because Ron did not want Betsy to work, and three births in the past four years kept her at home for some months with each baby, the family's financial problems intensified. The last time they were evicted, the landlord would not return what was left of their security deposit for fourteen days, and they had no money to pay for a motel or another apartment.