48 Simon Communities in Ireland Service providers also noted the obligation of care that can be placed on women in relation to ‘looking after’ individuals in their wider family networks such as elderly parents, siblings and other relatives. These responsibilities can further increase women’s levels of stress and anxiety, particularly in the context of housing instability. “I think the big difference between men and women is women are having to deal with a lot more stress because of motherhood, the family stuff ... And so they carry this huge burden of responsibility around, not just looking after themselves and providing a home for themselves - it’s providing for them, their children, sometimes they are still responsible for family networks, their mother, their father, their sister, their brother.” Several structural barriers to housing stability for homeless mothers, in particular, were also identified including, for example, limited accommodation and move-on options for women with children and a lack of affordable childcare facilities which can hamper women’s ability to re- enter the work force, engage in education/training programmes and/or reintegrate within community settings. As one pratitioner explained, this can result in repeat entries to homelessness and/or women staying in emergency or short-term accommodation with their children for extended periods. “We would find the referrals are limited because we can’t offer family-child support at all. We are limited in the number of referrals we are getting so there is a cohort of women with families and children who are left either in the homeless cycle and waiting maybe for a long-term leasing to come up or private rented. That sometimes fails and the whole cycle begins again because the level of support is still there and the need is there but we can’t give it because there is no facility for children, you know.” Service providers also identified specific barriers to housing stability faced by homeless couples, including a lack of couple’s accommodation generally and the requirement to register as a couple (resulting in reduced welfare payments) in order to access mainstream homeless services. “We have two rooms in one of the hostels that we ‘unofficially’ call our couple’s accommodation but that’s all we have. We work with fourteen couples and we have two rooms and they residents are all fighting over them.” Furthermore, several practitioners noted that, in their experience, when relationships form in the context of homelessness, the individuals involved can become overly dependent on each other. This co-dependence limits women’s (and men’s) move-on options as well as their motivation to move to independent accommodation (since they would be separated from their partner) in some cases: “Even getting the women into appropriate accommodation to start that move on process, you just can’t even do that because they are so dependent on their partner”. Differing cultural ‘norms’ and values in relation to intimate relationships, and relationship breakdown in particular, may also make some women more vulnerable in the context of domestic violence: “In certain cultures like the woman is absolutely frowned upon to leave the man”. For example, one service provider talked about the repercussions for one service user of leaving her abusive husband, which left her with minimal support and also severed links with family and community networks that may have been beneficial in relation to her future attempts to exit homelessness.
Women, Homelessness and Service Provision
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