A Radical New Solution To Family Violence And A Look At How We Can Bring Shelter Home

Ann Deslandes
5 min readMay 16, 2017

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In the five years that I worked in refuges for women and children in Sydney, I did not meet one so-called client who did not carry some shame about being there. The skilled efforts of our staff to create a kind environment and a holistic service response could only go so far for women reckoning with the shame of sudden poverty, of disorientation in a new neighbourhood, of having to disclose the situation to their children’s teachers, of being subject to a curfew, of having to deal with the police, or simply of being the recipient of a social service aimed at people in need. This embarrassment was evident on top of the shame which so many victims of violence unjustly bear: that of not being able to fix the problems at home, and the sneaking suspicion that perhaps she had still, somehow, brought it on herself.

Witnessing such impacts on women who had already made the extraordinary move to leave violence at home led me, as many of my colleagues in support services, policy advocacy and social research had already been doing for a long time, to wonder what else might be possible for us as a community to support people to be free from violence at home without the imposition of extra burdens from a service system intended to provide, well, services. The time for this is right in many ways — it is by now well accepted that Australia has a deeply shocking level of violence against women, which takes particular shape in the intimate setting of home and heterosexual partnership and is cross-cut by other forms of intimate partner violence, such as between same-sex couples; and of family violence, such as child abuse, elder abuse, and sibling violence.

It’s time to think creatively about how we make and prosecute safe space in the twenty-first century. In the debate about ending violence in the home, we are now in a position to focus on removing the perpetrator and healing their violence. Heck, perhaps we could even turn some of the current stock of shelters into rehab centres for perpetrators of violence.

These days, the deaths of women at the hands of their partners are reported and condemned. Opinion columns, television series and panel shows have been devoted to exploring the issue. And in all of these fora, the provision of funding and other resources to maintain shelters or refuges for people escaping violence at home remains a red-hot touchstone for collectively responding to, and campaigning to end, the problem.

In this still-dominant frame, the numbers of women in need of shelter and the number of shelter beds are often cited to starkly illustrate the extent of the problem and the shortfall in resources to stop further harm, whilst campaigns to keep shelters running or increase the number of beds have the urgency of saving the lives of women and children. The provision of emergency shelters for people leaving violence at home, it seems, is the most widely shared barometer we have of how well we are doing in ending the everyday epidemic of violence against women. Without a doubt, this reflects the long-standing success of the women’s refuge movement in Australia in protecting women and children from men’s violence over the past forty years.

And yet, leaving violence at home for a women’s shelter means women and children become homeless on top of surviving domestic violence. They leave behind possessions, pets, their daily service networks, sometimes their jobs; children are enrolled in new schools; they are suddenly subject to the procedures of the organisation running the refuge and the services set up to manage the move away from home and into shelter (banking, employment, police orders), and to the natural surveillance of group living among equally traumatised strangers. As the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported in February this year, the chances of achieving secure housing for clients of domestic violence support services stand at a mere nine per cent at the first request after leaving a violent home.

As Swinburne academic Dr Angela Spinney has said, “the refuge movement has done a terrific job of keeping women safe, but it means that we view the problem of family violence as being solved by removing the victims from their homes.” Expanding this view can be difficult to do because sheltering people from violence and making new spaces that are free from that violence are such powerful human ideas about taking care of each other, the refuge movement has been at the forefront of this discourse, and the need for such spaces is so righteously, seductively communicated in rhetoric about saving lives.

It is particularly difficult to do for many proponents of refuge services whose politics and advocacy are bound up in the Whitlam-era social movements that birthed and sustained women’s shelters. This politics has been largely subject to a petty, ugly backlash from many conservative leaders in our federation, for whom ‘staying in the home’ means ‘putting up with violence’ (for example, in 2014 the New South Wales Government introduced sweeping changes to family violence responses under a reform program that was literally named ‘Going Home, Staying Home’; and family violence experts estimate that woefully inadequate 2016 Federal Budget funding allocations for services will continue to leave thousands of women without access to specialist services and legal support, with Aboriginal women particularly underserved despite relentless evidence of the failure of multiple systems to keep them safe from violence.)

In the heat and stink of this backlash and its consequences, it remains significant that in public debate we get beyond ‘funding women’s shelters’ as the strongest solution to violence against women, and as the main index of how well we are doing as a nation to address violence against women.

In Queensland, it is now mandatory for Magistrates to consider ‘ouster conditions’ allowing domestic violence victims to remain in the home, while forcing perpetrators to leave. In Victoria, the Royal Commission into Family Violence heard evidence from Dr Spinney and others about the burgeoning success ‘safe-at-home’ responses to family violence and has recommended providing long-term rental and mortgage subsidies to victims and giving priority to any other measure that assists people to stay at home where that is their preference. The peak body for services countering family violence in NSW has urged their state government to consider where similar solutions already exist and could be built upon in that state. Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety will soon launch the first national mapping and meta-evaluation of ‘safe-at-home’ schemes, with recommendations for policy that will no doubt be of interest if fixing violence against women is one of your priority areas in deciding who to vote for in the coming federal election.

Nobody should be compelled to leave their homes and communities in order to get away from intimate violence. Women and children have the right, and ought to have the choice, to remain in their homes after experiencing domestic violence. There are a growing number of options for this currently being implemented that we might start to think of as appropriately complex, creative indicators of progress in healing the epidemic of domestic violence in this country and that are worthy of your consideration and support.

ANROWS have launched the first national mapping and meta-evaluation of ‘safe-at-home’ schemes, with policy recommendations

Download it here

Categories

Action , Politics

Originally published at www.thevocal.com.au.

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