Domestic Violence Is a Housing Problem
"The home is often not a space of refuge." — Alva Gotby
The processes of caring work, low pay, and domestic abuse are all intertwined. Women’s caring responsibilities and low income sometimes force them to move in with parents or other family members, or to stay in abusive relationships. Domestic violence is deeply connected to women’s role within the home as caregivers and workers who lack control over the space they inhabit and work in. Women often face violence in a continuum with the social expectation that they provide a certain level of domestic comfort, and this violence thus serves as a tool of disciplining their domestic labour. If they try to leave, the violence can get worse, as it functions to keep the family unit intact. Women’s lack of privacy within the home also means they often can’t withdraw when interactions with partners become hostile. And the fact that the sanctity of the family home is so deeply entrenched in bourgeois culture means that the domestic space is shielded from neighbours and friends who could otherwise intervene in situations of domestic abuse. The domestic sphere can be incredibly dangerous for those who do not necessarily benefit from living in a space that has been separated from the public sphere. For many women, children, and queer and trans people (especially queer and trans youth), home is far from the safe haven it is often portrayed as. It can be a space of abuse, domination, and control. Domestic abuse is thus a housing issue not only in the sense of being a leading cause of women’s homelessness, but also because the design of private homes creates shelter for harmful behaviour. The very thing that is supposed to protect people from violence – the private domestic space – becomes a source of violence and a condition for its continuation. As M. E. O’Brien puts it, ‘there is a clear division in many families between behavior presented to the outside world and what is acceptable behind closed doors, creating conditions for otherwise socially unacceptable violence’.[1] Heterosexual culture is often demeaning and harmful both for queer people and for heterosexual women, who bear the brunt of the violence perpetrated in the name of love.
Violence and harassment against women is not only perpetrated by partners and ex-partners. I have heard women tenants report feeling unsafe in their homes due to sexist harassment and violence from landlords and letting agents. Such harassment often means that the tenant is no longer able to feel at home, as the constant worry about the landlord turning up without notice means that the house does not offer protection from the outside world. This is especially common for racialised women and single mothers, who face constant discrimination, harassment, and violence within a housing system largely controlled by white men. While landlord harassment can affect any renter, we should not ignore the gendered and racialised elements of landlord–tenant interactions.
The home, then, is often not a space of refuge. But leaving an abusive home is often incredibly hard, both because of emotional links that tie victims of abuse to the family and the home (which may feel like the only emotional attachments possible) and because leaving an abusive home might mean facing homelessness. Home is what we depend on, even if it is also a place of harm. If there is anything I’ve learnt from years of involvement in struggles around domestic violence and housing, it is that domestic violence is a housing problem. Survivors of abuse often don’t want to see their partner or ex-partner in prison. Instead, their highest priority is accessing safe and stable housing. The lack of affordable and easily accessible places to live means that too many people end up staying in homes where they face violence or abuse. And those who do manage to leave suffer from the stressful and retraumatising experience of trying to access housing support from underfunded services. Not having the financial means to pay a deposit and the first month of rent, or not having a guarantor to co-sign a tenancy agreement, can also be a barrier to securing housing.[2] Tenants are typically expected to provide references from an employer and their most recent landlord, something that people suddenly having to flee violence often lack.
While most people experiencing domestic abuse are legally entitled to be rehoused by the state in the UK, in reality this support is often very difficult to access. Local councils, which are responsible for rehousing those who experience domestic violence, tend to engage in gatekeeping practices, with the result that people fleeing their homes are often unlawfully denied a safe home. This includes practices of demanding large amounts of evidence that the person seeking support is experiencing violence, long wait times to access housing, and disbelief that the survivor is actually experiencing domestic violence, to the point where survivors of abuse report regretting fleeing their homes.[3] When local councils do accept that they have an obligation to rehouse, they often place survivors in unsuitable housing in poor condition, thus exacerbating the trauma of domestic violence and homelessness. As Ellen Malos and Gill Hague point out, the loss of home can be especially traumatic for those who have worked hard to create a home under difficult circumstances. Fleeing domestic violence can mean not only the loss of relationships and support systems, but also the loss of sense of self that has become entangled with the domestic space one has worked to make and maintain.[4]
In an increasingly overburdened system of temporary accommodation provided by local authorities, women who become homeless are often displaced not only from their homes but also from the area where they used to live. It is common practice, especially in large English cities, to move homeless households to cheaper areas – sometimes in a completely different part of the country. Homeless households are forced to take whatever they are offered, as they will otherwise risk losing their right to be housed at all.
This system is often especially devastating for women. People who have experienced domestic violence are often forced to relocate to a place where they can’t be easily found. Some women experiencing domestic abuse choose to stay with an abusive partner rather than being forced to leave the area they live in, so that even the threat of displacement puts women more at risk of continued violence and abuse.[5] Single mothers who are forced out of their homes by overcrowding or eviction also leave support systems behind. Especially when they are forced to move far away, they no longer have access to the informal childcare provided by friends or relatives that enabled them to have any form of life outside their home and caring responsibility. Working-class women in particular tend to depend on very site-specific forms of caring networks, such as the informal practices of shared responsibility for childcare that mothers on working-class estates often develop.[6] Placing young children in daycare centres can be incredibly expensive, way beyond the means of women who may have lost even their precarious and low-paid work in the process of becoming homeless and having to relocate. This leads women to a situation of sole responsibility for the care of young children, stuck in an unfamiliar place far from their support systems. The isolation many experience within the family home can become even worse when they are forced to leave it. Watt writes that many of his interviewees spoke of this deep sense of isolation when they were displaced through the homelessness system.[7] It’s important to point out that this isolation causes not only emotional distress but more work, as the pressures of childcare increase and mothers have to try to compensate for the distress their children experience when they are made homeless.
The nexus of caring responsibilities, lack of affordable homes and decent incomes, and violence experienced by many women leads us back to a critique of the notion of home as a space sheltered from the danger and stress of the outside world. Home is not necessarily a place of rest – it is usually the space where some people have to work very hard to keep themselves and other people reasonably healthy and happy. The privacy that defenders of the bourgeois home praise can in fact be experienced as a deep isolation, which exacerbates domestic exploitation and abuse. Against romantic defences of the home, we can create a liberatory politics of home that seeks to preserve it as a space of autonomy from bosses and landlords while simultaneously questioning our domestic isolation from neighbours, friends, and members of our various communities.
Women have often been central in struggles for a different housing system. The 1915 Glasgow rent strike was famously led by proletarian women who were fed up with handing over an increasing portion of a meagre wage to their landlords. In a quieter way, women did the work that enabled the Bengali squatters’ movement in 1970s East London, reproducing not only their families but the movement itself. Shabna Begum points to women’s role in creating collective spaces in which the squatters could meet, eat, and socialise as an essential aspect of creating a successful movement in a hostile city.[8] These are not isolated instances, but examples of the core role that women have played in building and sustaining housing movements. As they are the very people disproportionately affected by the housing crisis, it should come as no surprise that women are at the forefront of struggles to transform the housing system as a whole.
— An edited excerpt from Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing by Alva Gotby (30% off as part of our Valentine's Day reading - ends February 16th).
1. M. E. O’Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, Pluto Press, 2023, pp. 41f.
2. Mike Berry, A Theory of Housing Provision under Capitalism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, p. 129.
3. Isabella Mulholland, ‘Abused twice: The “gatekeeping” of housing support for domestic abuse survivors in every London borough’, Public Interest Law Centre, 2022.
4. Ellen Malos and Gill Hague, ‘Women, housing, homelessness and domestic violence’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 20:3, 1997, pp. 397–410 pp. 398, 401.
5. I’m grateful to Nick Bano for emphasising this point. Personal correspondence, 12 February 2024.
6. Paul Watt, Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London, Bristol University Press, 2021, p. 162.
7. Watt, ‘Gendering the right to housing in the city’, p. 48.
8. Shabna Begum, From Sylhet to Spitalfields: Bengali Squatters in 1970s East London, Lawrence Wishart, 2023, pp. 67, 130.