44 Simon Communities in Ireland Caitlyn had been abstinent for three years at the time of interview and felt ready to ‘sign off’ with support services: They services have helped me so much over the last few years but it is time just to go out on my own now. I’m out on my own two feet and I feel ready enough to kind of walk away”. She had recently been accepted to college, had returned to work on a part-time basis and had moved to a council house following a short stay in private rented accommodation. Reflecting on her experiences with services and the progress she had made, Caitlyn felt secure in her housing and was positive about the future. “Like obviously I am still linked in with services and I know they are there if anything ever comes up. But I have secured housing and I am looking to go to college and stuff like that. So it has been a gradual scale like, it is all positive like, to look back on what I have achieved really.” CASE STUDY 3: Jessica, age 25 Jessica was residing in emergency accommodation at the time of interview and had been living there for several months following a stay in a residential drug treatment facility. She was born into a large family and had witnessed high levels of domestic violence in the family home. She was also sexually abused by a relative over a 4-year period between the age of 4 and 8 years: “I grew up very, very badly, I really did”. Her father left the family home when she was 9 years old and this had a particularly negative impact on Jessica, who struggled to come to terms with her subsequent feelings of loss and rejection: “That really destroyed me when my dad left. It really hurt. To this day it really hurts”. In response to her difficult home situation and past experiences, Jessica began to ‘act out’ and self-harm. “The only way I felt that I was releasing things was by hitting somebody or hitting something or breaking something … I cut myself and things like that as well to release the pain.” At the age of 12 she entered into a relationship with an older man in his 20s who soon became violent and abusive: “He sexual partner beat me to death, kicked me, told me I was useless, told me I wasn’t worth anything”. The relationship continued for 9 years and, during this time, Jessica also experienced a series of traumatic events, including the death of a number of family members, the rape of her friend and being witness to violent assaults: “All that happened to me in the space of a few years, my head was all messed up over it”. Jessica described this particularly chaotic period as “the worst time of her life” and reported that her mental health deteriorated very significantly as she became increasingly isolated and depressed: “I felt like I didn’t want to live anymore, I just wanted to be gone”. She returned to the home of her mother at the age of 21 after realising that she was pregnant and gave birth to her first child at the age of 22. She subsequently found it difficult to cope with motherhood and told that she initiated heroin use in order to self-medicate symptoms of depression. “Things go so bad, I just got more and more depressed. I wanted to kill myself. I just kept taking more and more heroin. It got rid of all my worries but when it wore off then they were all back ten times worse”.
Women, Homelessness and Service Provision
To see the actual publication please follow the link above