Women, Homelessness and Service Provision 27 “After leaving industrial school I didn’t know what to do, I was put into accommodation with some people and I didn’t know how to cope… I didn’t know what it was like to sit opposite an adult, I felt terribly intimidated. I didn’t want to sit beside an adult and eat, I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the social skills, my behaviour pattern was very odd …” (Fionnula, 58) Some women expressed profound distrust in the homeless service sector because of their past negative experiences of institutional and/or other State care settings and this, in turn, impacted their willingness and ability to access and engage with services and service providers. For example, Rosie spoke about how she was reluctant to access support services when she became homeless after running away from a care setting at the age of 14, opting instead to sleep rough in a city-centre location. “I was constantly running away from everybody, you know what I mean, like the Guards or the social workers or somebody else worrying about me you know … For the two years I was homeless, I didn’t go looking for help off anybody, because I knew I wouldn’t get the help, you know, because at that age you don’t, I would get put back into the system - the care system or you sleep out in the streets, they were the two options that you have and I figured that out fairly quickly. So I didn’t ask for help because of fear of being put back into the system again.” (Rosie, 38) Rosie went on to explain that she remains sceptical about trusting others because of her past experiences: “Every time I got to know somebody, trusted somebody, something bad always happened, you know … I’m kind of wary of that, you know what I mean” (Rosie, 38). Residential care was just one of a number of institutional settings where women had resided temporarily over the course of their lives; reports of lengthy stays in acute hospitals, psychiatric hospitals and prison were also commonplace. For instance, Liz - who had spent considerable periods of time incarcerated - explained that her experience of prison has served to negatively colour her perception of authority figures. “It prison didn’t do me any good, put it that way. It done me bad if anything … Em, pause because now I hate police and I hate prison officers and all them authority people as I say, I just don’t like authority and that’s it.” (Liz, 38) The narratives of women who reported protracted stays in institutional settings almost always emphasised their poor access to appropriate services and supports as well as a lack of preparedness for independent living, which negatively impacted their ability to secure and/or sustain stable housing in later life: “I was so naïve … a woman that hasn’t got a clue how to live. You know, I couldn’t do anything for myself” (Donna, 35). These women’s experiences of housing instability were often linked to a general inability to cope due to deficits in everyday life skills such as cooking, cleaning, paying bills and budgeting, which often resulted in the women losing accommodation and re-entering homelessness. Many also reported periods of extreme loneliness and isolation during times when they struggled to live independently without support. “Being institutionalised, I had not got the faintest idea to survive, I was afraid of the world. Even to this day, I am still afraid of the world… I felt very lonely, terribly frightened because I would not have been able, even at 25 years of age to live on my own. If you put me into a room or a bedsit, I would have died because I did not know how to live. I wouldn’t have lived. I’d have died.” (Fionnula, 58)
Women, Homelessness and Service Provision
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