Driven to despair: the hidden homeless

Updated August 03, 2011 21:53:17

Oi!  Dev, what are you doing tonight? Wanna have a drink?

Can't. I'm sleeping in my car. It's Women's Car Sleepout night.


To raise awareness of the massive and growing amount of homeless women and children and the lack of safe housing and services for them.

What homeless women?  I don't see any. The odd bag lady and "got any spare change junkie" but hardly ever.

That's why we need to raise awareness. Women and children are the largest proportion homeless people.  There are over 100,000 homeless in Australia every night and over 50,000 are women and children. And they're largely invisible. The crazy, drunk or out of control stereotype of a homeless woman, makes us feel better about ourselves because we think "that can never be me". It's terrifying, but many of us are only a couple of pay packets away from homelessness.

Invisible?  Why are they invisible?

Mothers and children are almost always escaping violence so they hide because of fear of being seen and found. Older women don't think there are services for them so don't bother looking or asking.

They feel shame and failure so they all hide and because they are all hiding it makes them feel huge shame and failure, because they feel they are the only ones so must have done something wrong. Because there are almost NO services and safe accommodation it reinforces this belief (no services because it doesn't exist) and feeling of shame and failure which makes catching stats almost impossible. Homeless people with more traditional profiles, single males and people suffering mental illness or substance abuse, have far more services and housing available which leads to greater stat catching.

What is "catching stats" and why is it important?

Catching stats is finding out the numbers of homeless in order to have the right amount of funding and services and to be able to create that by policy.  We need to prove there is a need to get action.  If women and children are in housing, refuges or hostels we can count them and prove the need for money and resources.

In our upcoming census, homeless who are sleeping rough and sleeping in cars will be counted as best we can. For the first time. There has been a campaign to get resources to go out to these places we know they are to have them counted in the census.  Of course we don't know where all of them are but it is better than nothing. The bureaucrats have made this very difficult.  Not knowing makes it much easier for them to do nothing about this unsexy social problem.

Why are they homeless?

People are homeless for different reasons and they need different responses.

The number one reason for homelessness for women and children is escaping domestic violence.  96% of perpetrators are male. 81% of defendants in family violence are male, 19% are female. Women are most likely to use violence as a form of self-defence rather than initiate the attack. Women suffer more serious injuries in incidents of family violence than men. 20% of all homicides involve intimate partners. 77% have a female victim.

Single females over 50 make up a huge amount of the homeless and the number is increasing dramatically.  There is a prediction of a tsunami of older homeless women in the next few years.  Here is a typical trajectory:  relationship breakdown leaves older woman single; she loses her job through discrimination, sickness or bad luck; she can’t pay the rent or mortgage, couch surfs for a while before eventually sleeping in her car.

How can this be?

Social inequity.  Women over 40 are lucky to have half the superannuation and half the savings as men of the same age ($8000 or less is the amount that around half of women aged 45–59 have in superannuation.) Women over 50 have spent on average only half the amount of time in the workforce (due to the sexually transmitted inconvenience of bearing children and the socially constructed convenience of having women perform the majority of the domestic and childcare) as men.

Women over 50 are half as likely to get a job as men and if they do, will, on-average earn half as much per hour.  Men over 50 are twice as likely to re-partner as women.

I was speaking to Anne Summers the other day as we were both speaking at the State School Teachers Union of WA – Women's Conference.  She reminded me of the great motto "A husband is not a financial plan".

This is an except from her speech.

“The gender pay gap in Australia is 83 per cent.  That means that women still earn, on average, 17 per cent less than men.[i] And it is widening. In 1991 women’s full-time average weekly earnings were 85 per cent of men’s.[ii]


"In other words, there is a $1 million penalty for being a woman in Australia today

"I was relaying this to a social worker who deals with homeless women and children and she said, 'I was thinking about the word home.  I thought it starts with HO and ends with ME.  Home, a ho there for me. That’s how some of these men think.  Women are often their own enemy too. They don’t speak up because they don’t want to make a fuss.'

"The more who speak up the more who will speak up.

"Homeless men with traditional profiles are far more likely to feel comfortable telling their story and asking for what they need than women. And of course they deserve food clothes and a safe place. They have a sense of entitlement and willingness to speak up almost non-existent in homeless women and children. The homeless and women deserve a home too."

You say this is on the rise.  How so?

Rise in family breakdowns.

Aging population.

Increase in violence due to difficult and unpredictable economic times and precarious employment.

Why are you so passionate about it?

The women, mums and kids feel fear and shame. They feel they have failed, they've done something wrong and they're the only ones. They're so alone and so vulnerable. Society is having a tantrum with reality. We need to acknowledge that society has changed dramatically in the last 30 years and we haven't kept up. Homeless women and children is the most un-Australian thing in the world.  We pride ourselves on a fair go and brag about our unique ability to lend a helping hand to those doing it tough.  I want to see people prove this.

What can we do?

My mate Kon from Asylum Seekers Resource Centre always says "donate, participate and advocate".

Donate here.

Participate in the 2012 Women's Car Sleepout or check out Victorian Women's Housing Association.

Advocate.  Talk to your friends and family about this, write letters to your local member, newspapers, call talk back, raise the issue wherever you can.

We also need changes to taxation. Currently it is cheaper for negative gearing investors to keep the property empty. The laws need to be changed so the properties must be tenanted. Currently in Victoria there are 40,000 empty investment properties. Organizations like WISHIN are currently trialling schemes to tenant properties with a guarantee the properties will be returned in the same or better condition.

If you have an empty rental property and are interested in tenanting it out with a guarantee of stability let an organization like Wishin or Victorian Women's Housing Association know.

When you don't know what to do, do anything. Please help. It could be you, your mum, your daughter, sister, niece, nanna or me. Every woman deserves a safe home every night. Bless you. 

Catherine Deveny is a writer, comedian and social commentator.


[ii]  Equal Pay. A Background Paper, Department of Industrial Relations, Canberra n.d. (c. 1991) p. 7

Topics: homelessness, community-and-society, domestic-violence, government-and-politics

First posted August 03, 2011 15:33:43