newsletter - Australian Domestic and Family Violence Clearing House

6
FEATURE
The Road Home: an opportunity to address
women, domestic and family violence and
homelessness
by Ludo McFerran, Clearinghouse Project Officer
The Commonwealth Government’s White Paper
on Homelessness The Road Home (FaHCSIA 2008)
marks an important new direction in addressing
homelessness in Australia through a range of
strategies including:
•recognising that the homeless population is not only
made up of people who access funded supported
accommodation services (SAAP),
but also people who sleep rough
or are in temporary and insecure
accommodation
•setting concrete targets to
halve overall homelessness and
to offer accommodation to all
people sleeping rough by 2020
(COAG goals)
•allocating $1.2 billion over
the next four years as a ‘down
payment’ on the 12-year reform
agenda in the White Paper: $800
million for services to prevent and
reduce homelessness and $400
million to increase the supply of
affordable and supported housing
•positioning homelessness within
a mainstream framework, specifically proposing to
develop homelessness action plans with state and
territory governments, to improve collaboration
between mainstream and homelessness services,
and, importantly, implementing a ‘no exits into
homelessness’ policy from statutory, custodial care,
health, mental health and drug and alcohol services
•in conjunction with states and territories, delivering
expanded models to enable women and children
experiencing domestic and family violence to remain
at home safely, incorporating specialist outreach
workers, brokerage funds for home security systems 1 ,
and integrated family violence systems
•recognising the complexities of the ageing of the
homeless population and allocating aged care
places and capital for new specialist facilities for the
aged homeless
•enhancing the role of Centrelink to advise and
assist people at risk of homelessness with 90 new
Community Engagement Officers.
The homelessness sector has reacted positively and is
now scrutinising the detail. The capacity to deliver the
ambitious reform agenda will largely depend on the
outcome of negotiations with states and territories and
on the unfolding global economic downturn.
Nevertheless, the White Paper is a strong indicator that the
Commonwealth Government is prepared to address some
of the entrenched problems of gender disadvantage in
homelessness policy and provision, housing affordability
and the double victimisation of women and children as
a result of domestic and family violence. A gendered
position on women and homelessness is critically needed.
Recent research (Sharam 2008) has emphasised once again
the invisibility of women’s homelessness when not directly
linked to a recent incident of domestic or family violence,
and predicted a significant increase in
the numbers of pension aged women
into the primary homeless population
over the next 20 years.
Old connections
The relationship between
homelessness and domestic and
family violence goes back a century
and beyond. Religious organisations
ran women’s hostels providing
shelter for homeless women and
the Victorian YWCA opened its first
women’s hostel in 1887. Women’s
homelessness, however, remained
largely overshadowed by that of
men’s.
The feminist inspired refuge
movement in Australia in 1974-75 did
not differentiate between women’s need for housing and
need for safety from domestic and family violence. In the
first four months of opening, more than half the residents
of Elsie Women’s Refuge had been recently discharged
from psychiatric hospitals or were long-term, homeless
single women. But increasingly, the lifestyles and needs
of single women clashed with those of women with
dependent children, which led to a policy of prioritising
access for women with young children who had recent
experience of domestic and family violence. Despite the
opening of a small number of single women’s refuges in
the 1980s, homeless single and older women issues were
largely relegated again to obscurity.
Ageing women have not been identified as a target
group in domestic and family violence or homeless policy,
legislation or services. The Government’s White Paper
offers an opportunity to redress the neglect of single and
older homeless women that has been entrenched since
the decline of the open door policy at Elsie.
1 ‘Essential’ and integral’ is how Detective Superintendent Gerry Campbell from the London Metropolitan Police and Commander Colin Little from the Tasmanian
Police described the capacity to install security systems in homes for women and children, at the Clearinghouse Forum, Better policing: Better Outcomes: Changing
police culture to prevent domestic violence and domestic homicide, 4 December 2008, Sydney.
newsletter 36