Hard Lives, Mean Streets: Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women

7: Violence as a Cause of Homelessness among Women

= 7 = Violence as a Cause of Homelessness among Women I think the violence and abuse probably led to [the homelessness] because when I get down in the dumps, I’m always thinking about all that bad stuff. And then I’ve been through so much trauma in the last couple of years that I just felt so beat down and just so lost and I’m asking myself, how did I go from self-sufficient, taking care of myself, to I was losing everything? —Natalie The previous chapter illustrated the childhood nexus of conditions for the women in our study, clearly showing that violence was an enduring part of their early lives and shaped every subsequent decision and action. Even with childhoods interrupted with violence and abuse, the women in our study carried with them idealized notions of what a family and marriage should look like. Similarly, as noted above, Raphael (2000) found that women who grow up in conditions of extreme poverty or abuse are incredibly eager to have a nuclear family, although their early circumstances prevented them from developing healthy boundaries and skills of self-protection (Kathleen Ferraro 2006). Childhood experiences of violence, however, often occur within larger inequalities and contexts of poverty, neglect, loss, social exclusion and dislocation, substance use, illness, and desperation. Because of these complex structural, institutional, and interpersonal realities , and despite the women’s goals of normal family life in adulthood, they end up enduring dangerous, violent adult relationships. Indeed, as noted above, almost the same percentage of women who experienced physical violence as a child experienced physical victimization as an adult. A signi>cant 104 HARD LIVES, MEAN STREETS proportion of women who are homeless may be without housing as a result of these experiences with violence: the quantitative data we collected indicate that one homeless woman in four is homeless at least in part because of violence. Further, some of the women in our study were former shelter residents, who had come straight from the domestic violence shelter to the homeless shelter. Not surprisingly, the relationship between violence and homelessness emerged in one of two areas: child abuse, or violence from an adult intimate partner. Childhood In our attempt to understand the paths to homelessness, we asked the women to think back to their childhood memories and tell us if they had ever left their childhood home due to abuse or violence. Almost one in three told us that was part of their personal history. Many of these women grew up in unstable households, where adoptive parents, stepparents, siblings , and friends of the family subjected them to repeated sexual or physical assaults. Childhood memories for many of the women included violence, fear, and betrayal by their own family. For these women, home was not a safe haven where they were protected from the outside world; as a result, they often took the >rst opportunity they had to leave in search of a better life. This was discussed in the previous chapter, in terms of early independence. As mentioned there, we found that women who experienced minor or severe childhood violence were on average three years younger when they >rst become homeless, and they had more, and longer, periods of homelessness. Here are two of the responses to the open-ended question in our survey about why women left home and became homeless for the >rst time: At 12 years old I was molested by my best friend’s father for about a year, during the time my mother divorced my stepdad and started dating numerous men. In the middle of the night men would come into my room and abuse me. By age 17 years old I was gang raped by 12 boys. I felt alone. I got tired of him touching me—then he started giving my little sister money and I knew what was next and I tried to tell her but she said I was lying and to stop and be happy for mama so one night in the middle of the night I left. For good. Violence as a Cause of Homelessness 105 For many of these women, sexual victimization experiences frequently occurred while their parents or guardians were preoccupied with drugs and alcohol. One woman recalled her sexual victimization at the hands of her brother. When she told her alcoholic parents, they did not believe her. For others, substance use was central to other...