Women, Homelessness and Service Provision 47 While service providers noted that men may share some experiences with women, many emphasised that the presenting problems of female service users tended to be more deeply entrenched due, in large part, to the ‘hidden’ nature of women’s homelessness which results in their accessing services at a much later stage than their male counterparts. In the quote below one service provider explained the high support needs of the women who typically present to services. “Women are so traumatised by the time they do come to us services, they are now afraid to go out and live alone and to be able to cope, they have no coping skills because, I think at this stage, when they do come to us, they have lost everything. They have lost whatever family life they had, they have been on the streets where they are very vulnerable, as we know, for rape and assaults and everything.” Practitioners also stressed that women tend to need more intensive therapeutic intervention as well as longer-term programmes of support to address these needs and to assist them with the move to independent living situations. It was suggested that this was particularly the case for women with more lengthy homeless histories characterised by repeat entries to homeless services. “Some of the older ladies that would come through services would have been around services a long time and would have a long history of domestic violence or in and out of care homes and things like that as children. So they have different support needs; it’s longer term, and they are inclined to move out and move back in again almost, you know, they have a revolving circle with the door.” “There is just that bit of a difference between men and women. For the women who are in services longer and maybe it took them longer to get into services, the emotional needs that they have and the trauma that they have experienced in their lives is very hard. It’s not going away overnight and there is never enough resources out there in terms of like really good access to psychologists and psychotherapy and it takes money and the resources aren’t there.” The burden and responsibility of care placed upon women was another issue highlighted repeatedly by service providers. Indeed, service providers emphasised the significant financial, practical and emotional difficulties that are commonly reported by women with children in their care. It was pointed out that most struggle with the challenge of meeting the basic needs of their children (i.e. providing food and clothing and access to health care and education) whilst simultaneously seeking to secure housing and address issues related to their personal physical and/or mental health and wellbeing: “Often when a woman is at risk there are children at risk and there is no childcare. The stress for women is huge and I suppose mental health is deteriorating for them as a result”. Perhaps significantly, a number of practitioners also discussed the potentially ‘normalising’ and ‘institutionalising’ effects of prolonged periods of family homelessness and the manner in which these patterns repeat themselves across generations. “We see the intergenerational homelessness stuff now so we are definitely seeing people who we saw as children coming into adult homelessness and you have to wonder … is it acceptable? That institutionalised bit is definitely there, you know, they are so used to coming in and out of homelessness, you know, years and years of families in and out, in and out.”
Women, Homelessness and Service Provision
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