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

4: Homeless Victims and Perpetrators of Violence

= 4 = Homeless Victims and Perpetrators of Violence He kept hitting me, pinching me, and I just refused to say anything. But when we were about a mile from the house, he reached over and backhanded me. And when he did, I don’t know what made me do it, but I did the same thing to him. As soon as we got to the house . . . he picked me up by the throat, slammed me up against the refrigerator—it felt like he had broke every bone in my body and I was just hanging there, shaking. —Natalie The early research on violence against women was crucial to raising awareness that millions of women were victims of violence, often at the hands of a partner or spouse (see, e.g., Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz 1980; Straus and Gelles 1990). From that point forward, scholars sought to increase public awareness of this type of violence as a signi>cant social problem. At the same time, researchers worked to re>ne the tools used for the measurement of this often hidden violence, the types of violence that intimate partners use, and the typical motives behind violence between intimate partners . As a result of this increased scholarly and public recognition and methodological advancements, a considerable amount of research aimed at more fully understanding the dynamics of violence has emerged. Today, national surveys of the violence that women have experienced include a new understanding that violence varies among di=erent groups or populations, because members of certain groups have di=erent access to social resources (e.g., income, healthcare, available transportation) and di=erent types of structural barriers (e.g., education, employment, stable housing) than members of other groups. Homeless women are one population for which the evidence about violence is still being collected. As the Victims and Perpetrators of Violence 55 National Research Council said over a decade ago: “Di=erences among subgroups in the causes of violence against women could have important implications for prevention and intervention strategies. Subgroups about which information is lacking include racial and ethnic minorities, lesbians, migrant workers, immigrants, the homeless, the disabled, and the elderly” (1996, 90; emphasis added); research since then has done relatively little to address this gap. As indicated in chapter 1, although there is general agreement that rates of violence against homeless women are high, studies vary on their assessment of just how high and how consistent these rates are. These di=erences are most likely a result of researchers’ using a variety of measures to assess the types and frequencies of violence that homeless women experience, varying samples of homeless populations across the country, and di=erent sets of questions about the experience of violence. In this chapter, we remain broad in our focus, comparing our study results with national rates of violence against women and locating this violence within a context of gender inequality. We then discuss a range of gender di=erences among homeless women and homeless men in terms of victimization and perpetration. Later chapters will probe in more depth particular aspects of violence and homelessness in the lives of the women in our study. This section, then, provides a backdrop for subsequent discussion. Studies of Victimization Our survey of homeless women in four Florida cities yields estimates on the amounts and types of violence these women have lived through. And although a comparison of our sample of homeless women with a national sample of women in general is not an ideal comparison, it is at least a starting point. A more appropriate comparison would be with a national sample of homeless women, but we know of no such sample. Furthermore, since we used the same measures of victimization as were used in the National Violence Against Women Survey (nvaws; Tjaden and Thoennes 2000), a comparison between our results and those of that national study is a logical >rst step. Keeping in mind that all women are at much higher risk than men of sexual assault, rape, and intimate partner violence, comparisons reveal that the women in our study were much more likely to be victimized than the women in the nvaws. For example, while the national survey 56 HARD LIVES, MEAN STREETS shows that slightly over 50 percent of women in general experience any type of violence during their lifetime, our study shows that approximately 80 percent of homeless women experience violence. Compared to women in general...