Housing crisis worsening violence against women, group says

Ottoline Spearman

The housing crisis is compounding violence against women, the National Women's Council (NWC) has said.

In a paper released on Wednesday, the organisation said that the housing crisis is enabling exploitation of women, in scenarios such as sex for rent exploitation.

Speaking on Newstalk, NWC's director Corrinne Hasson said: "The housing crisis is compounding the shocking levels of violence against women. Women leaving abuse, often with children, encounter a system with severely limited availability due to high demand, capable of only really meeting that short-term emergency accommodation need.

"More must be done to keep women and children in their homes and their communities, to stop them from falling through the cracks in the first place."

There are over 5,000 children in homeless services, with 4,500 women in emergency accommodation, but the organisation says that these figures are "just the tip of the iceberg".

"Official statistics don’t count women in refuges, or families sleeping on couches," said Hasson. "We simply don’t know how many women and families are in homelessness."

"What we do know is that domestic violence is a leading cause of women’s homelessness, and that the housing crisis is enabling exploitation of women, for example in sex for rent exploitation.”

The organisation found that family homelessness is gendered, with 56 per cent of homeless families headed by a lone parent - the vast majority being women who may be escaping violence at home.

Women seeking to escape domestic violence with their children are faced with stark choices which can involve being forced to choose between homelessness, or returning to their abuser.

Some groups of women are also much more likely to experience the housing crisis, including lone parents, traveller and Roma women, and women in international protection.

The NWC is calling for stronger legal protections that would allow women and children in abusive situations to remain safely in the family home, and for perpetrators to be removed instead.

The paper forms part of a submission which will inform the development of the Child and Family Homelessness Action Plan, by the Department of the Taoiseach and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

The action plan will be published in spring this year.