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Abstract

The home is a central place where women's identity as 'mother' is socially constructed and negotiated. Social policy is inexorably implicated in (re)producing these dominant visions of mothers, mothering, home-making and home. Yet, we know very little about how these same social policies are also implicated in women's loss of home. The article begins to address this evidence-gap. It draws on biographical research with homeless women to explore the ways in which key governing frameworks (associated with child protection processes, housing allocation policy and temporary accommodation provision in England) interact with women's status as mother, to shape the spaces they inhabit as home or not-home, materially and emotionally. We present data that illustrates how women's capacity to retain, make or rebuild a family home in times of crisis is significantly hampered by the policies and procedures they encounter in housing and social welfare systems.

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... There is a large body of qualitative research which explores the lived experience of homelessness, with more recent studies recognizing its hitherto overlooked gendered nature (e.g. Hastings and Craig 2023;Reeve 2018;Bimpson, Parr, and Reeve 2022;Reeve and Bimpson 2020;Mayock and Bretherton 2016;Mayock, Sheridan, and Parker 2015;Bretherton and Mayock 2021). While this important work draws attention to different aspects of women's homelessness, few studies foreground the affective, emotional and the embodied. ...
... These women raged at child protection interventions that implicitly held them responsible for the impact of violence (perpetrated against them) on their children, and which overlooked their housing needs (Bimpson, Reeve, and Parr 2020;Reeve and Bimpson 2020). In such circumstances, they had been forced to flee their homes to avoid the initiation of care proceedings or had no choice but to remain in an unsafe situation through lack of housing assistance, triggering the involvement of children's social care and the eventual removal of their children (Bimpson, Parr, and Reeve 2022;Bimpson, Reeve, and Parr 2020;Reeve and Parr 2023a, b). Marianne summed this up as being "punished twice" -by her former partner and by social services. ...
... Temporary accommodation brought with it a rule-bound existence (Watts and Blenkinso, 2022), which placed numerous restrictions on women's ability to exert control over their environment. Women expressed feelings of infantilisation due to a lack of agency over living arrangements and daily routines, such as not being allowed to make meals at certain times of the day, requirements to be in the accommodation at certain times, and not being allowed visitors (Bimpson, Parr, and Reeve 2022;Watts and Blenkinso, 2022). This was akin to a haunting, a feeling that they were under surveillance and being watched (Bennett 2011), feelings that were only intensified as they played out in the shadow of the women's lost homes and motherhood identities (McCarthy 2018). ...
... The home is well-established as a locale of critical importance to the social value replicatory function of heteronormative, idealised motherhood, with good mothering reliant upon a safe, private, secure, and stable base (Cramer, 2005;Bimpson et al., 2020). To be without a home therefore produces immediate social anxiety over mothering (Cramer, 2005;Bimpson et al., 2020). ...
... The home is well-established as a locale of critical importance to the social value replicatory function of heteronormative, idealised motherhood, with good mothering reliant upon a safe, private, secure, and stable base (Cramer, 2005;Bimpson et al., 2020). To be without a home therefore produces immediate social anxiety over mothering (Cramer, 2005;Bimpson et al., 2020). Becoming homeless brings poor families, especially those headed by a lone female, into the full view of the state, and renders their once-private activities public and subject to scrutiny (Cruikshank, 1999;Henderson et al., 2010;Bimpson et al., 2020). ...
... To be without a home therefore produces immediate social anxiety over mothering (Cramer, 2005;Bimpson et al., 2020). Becoming homeless brings poor families, especially those headed by a lone female, into the full view of the state, and renders their once-private activities public and subject to scrutiny (Cruikshank, 1999;Henderson et al., 2010;Bimpson et al., 2020). Homelessness is also a location where forms of power enabled by maternal identity can manifest. ...
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Despite increasing attention to the importance of gender as an analytic to understanding neoliberal welfare reform, little attention has been paid to how motherhood operates to structure experiences. We propose the term ‘maternal activation’ to describe how homeless mothers as a group are subject to, and yet repurpose and resist, specific forms of social control characterising neoliberal paternalistic welfare structures. Drawing on a Critical Discourse Analysis of semi-structured interviews with fifty-four frontline homelessness workers, and eighteen homeless mothers, within the newly conditionalised Welsh homelessness system, we argue that homeless mothers have distinct experiences of neoliberal welfare governance. They navigate contradictory demands of attentive caregiving and economically engaged citizenship, amid devaluation of care created by a neoliberal emphasis on entrepreneurialism. However, performing intense motherhood offers strategic advantage for homeless mothers by enabling them to be read as ‘legible’. This highlights the utility of motherhood as a framework to understand welfare citizenship.
... Child and family social workers were likely to be involved with the families as a result. The study of Anderson et al. (2006), as well as other wider UK literature on family homelessness, broadly consistently suggests the following issues commonly accompany family homelessness in the UK: domestic violence, relationship breakdown, neighbourhood harassment and poor housing conditions (Bimpson et al., 2020;Riley et al., 2003;Tischler, 2008;Vostanis, 2002). ...
... Evidence from Samzelius' Swedish study (2020) offers some analogous findings in that lone homeless migrant mothers reported that, while the wait for stable housing was their principal problem, their homelessness affected all other areas of their family life. Bimpson et al. (2020) study describes how the operation of housing policy in England structurally disadvantages some mothers waiting for re-housing in temporary homeless accommodation, whose children were not in their care at that time. As a result, they were classed as single adults, rather than as families with dependent children, and no longer counted as 'in priority need' for re-housing. ...
... Separate concerns were raised about the poor quality of temporary accommodation offered to those families fleeing domestic violence and its role in increasing family stress, as also highlighted in the study of Bimpson et al. (2020): ...
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As in many European states, a shortage of housing in England has resulted in some families who are ‘waiting for’ adequate and secure housing in England while also having the ‘weight of’ their children being placed outside their care hanging over them. This paper reports on the development of a practice guidance document that included an online survey with 38 children’s social services practitioners in England regarding their practice experiences of responding to family homelessness. Findings suggest the complexity of the issue of family homelessness and implicitly highlight its neglect within contemporary research and policy in the UK. Homeless families are caught between the constraints of housing shortages and the complexity of the needs underpinning their homelessness. Despite these constraints, social work practice has an important role to play in providing, or facilitating families’ pathway to, housing advocacy and advice. Most importantly of all, social work practice can maximise families’ access to statutory family support provision so that families can be helped to remain together wherever this is safely possible. Suggestions for practice, policy, and research development are outlined.
... 173). Bimpson et al. (2020) identified "a pressing need to scrutinise homelessness policy and practice through a gender-sensitive lens" (p. 14). ...
... The findings from our study have exposed how a lack of housing security not only deprives women of material conditions required to stabilise their lives, but also the opportunity to develop a "maternal identity" and prepare for motherhood. This concept was evoked by Bimpson et al. (2020) in their analysis of contemporary housing and social welfare policies in the UK, which they argued coalesced to undermine "acknowledgement" of a "maternal identity" (p. 2) for homeless mothers. Further, evidence deduced from this research indicates exclusionary practice frameworks exacerbate women's reticence to disclose pregnancy-fearing the implications for doing so. ...
Article
Despite the significant needs of pregnant homeless women, the paucity of literature on this topic has contributed to a gap in practice and policy knowledge about this vulnerable group. Drawing on two research projects undertaken in Victoria, Australia, the authors analysed interviews with women experiencing homelessness and interviews and focus groups with policy practitioners and service providers. Service system barriers faced by pregnant homeless women and the support needed to stabilise housing were explored. Results showed how the resource-depleted housing context, combined with organisational restrictions that constrained care coordination and continuity, generated exclusionary outcomes for pregnant homeless women. These findings, informed by a feminist critical social work framework, draw attention to: the harms of gender-blind policy and practice; the approaches to providing care that work; and a need within social work to address challenges unique to pregnant women experiencing homelessness. • IMPLICATIONS • Policy and practice that do not recognise gender generate exclusionary outcomes for pregnant homeless women. • There is a pressing need for affordable, suitable and long-term housing options for pregnant homeless women • Rapid rehousing into permanent accommodation that recognises pregnancy as a criterion is needed to meet requirements of pregnant homeless women. • A feminist critical social work approach highlights the need for continuous and coordinated care provision for pregnant homeless women
... In line with a long history of research on women's homelessness in the UK (Jones 1999;Quilgars et al. 2021;Bretherton 2020), 24 of the women were reported as parents who had been separated from their children. This high rate of separated parenthood, involving women placing their children with relatives when homelessness occurred and their children being taken into care, has been highlighted by some of the more recent research (Bretherton and Mayock 2021;Bimpson et al. 2022). Patterns of service use among the 59 women often showed long histories of engagement that had not resulted in sustained exits from homelessness. ...
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This paper explores the results of a study conducted in collaboration with the homelessness sector in central London and an academic team. Data were collected on 134 women who used homelessness services in an area of central London during a nine-day window. In addition, fully anonymised service history records, covering an average period of 85 months, were reviewed with the consent of another 59 women with lived experience of homelessness. Nine women also agreed to in-depth interviews. Five key stakeholders in policy and practice were also interviewed. The research supports the findings of earlier research into the gender dynamics of homelessness. The results highlight the presence of a high-cost, high-risk population of women who are characterised by sustained and recurrent experience of homelessness, housing exclusion, and deprivation and who make repeated and sustained use of homelessness and other services without escaping homelessness. Strong associations between domestic abuse and women’s homelessness are evident in the results of the research, again echoing the results of earlier work. The possibilities of developing new strategic responses to women’s homelessness, including specialised forms of Housing First, are considered.
... But there is no one-to-one relationship between the age and the characteristics commonly assigned to that age. [1][2][3][4][5] The problem is compounded particularly in under-developed countries with wide socio-economic differences, by the fact that some individuals are energetic and dynamic even at the age of 75, while some individuals are lazy and have withdrawn themselves from active life even at the age of 50. On the contrary, in developed countries, the aged are very active even at the age of 70 and above, because of special diet, good health care, physical and mental conditions, healthy environment and the cultural aspect of their work mindedness (Sharma, 2009). ...
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Ageing is a universal phenomenon besides an ascriptive status of an individual. Being continuing process, it is characterised by conception and death. Socio-cultural factors play a vital role in determining the status of an individual as an “old”. It is inevitable stage in which majority of the elderly people undergo through numerous economic, social and psychological problems which vary from individual to individual (Kumar, 2016). Furthermore, the determination of elderly age differs from country and society in accordance with the system and its sub-systems. In general, people reached the old age stage by adding the number of years from time of birth. But there is no one-to-one relationship between the age and the characteristics commonly assigned to that age. The problem is compounded particularly in under-developed countries with wide socio-economic differences, by the fact that some individuals are energetic and dynamic even at the age of 75, while some individuals are lazy and have withdrawn themselves from active life even at the age of 50. On the contrary, in developed countries, the aged are very active even at the age of 70 and above, because of special diet, good health care, physical and mental conditions, healthy environment and the cultural aspect of their work mindedness (Sharma, 2009).
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That domestic abuse is a human rights infringement has become recognised at policy, practice, and legislative level globally. Homelessness services are critical in averting and mitigating harm to those who have experienced domestic abuse. The British homelessness system achieves this, in part, through offering a legal right to housing in some circumstances. The Housing (Wales) Act 2014 integrates a human-rights based understanding of domestic abuse yet reduces legal rights to assistance. Based on analysis of interviews with fifty-two homelessness workers and twenty-four applicants I argue that moral commitments cannot compensate for legal rights; rather, they deresponsibilise homelessness services for addressing domestic abuse. I show (1) that workers saw cases where homelessness arose from domestic abuse as functionally beyond the remit of homelessness services (2) that empowered women were understood as undeserving by the system and (3) that workers saw domestic abuse cases as a broad and undefined threat to resources.
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The notion of ‘haunted futures’ can provoke new understandings of the experiences of birth mothers living apart from their children as a result of state-ordered court removal. As ‘abject figures’, the mothers are silenced through the stigma and shame of being judged to be a deeply flawed mother, the justifiable fear of future children being removed, and court-ordered reporting restrictions. In this article, the author depicts how these mothers exist in a state of haunted motherhood: they are paralysed in anticipation of an imagined future of reunification with their children. The mothers are painfully aware that any future pregnancy will also be subject to child protection procedures; thus even their future motherhood continues to be stigmatised by the past. However, while the ghosts of removed children signify a traumatic loss, they also simultaneously represent hope and future possibilities of transformation through re-narrativisation. The creation of spaces for the mothers to speak about their experiences can foster a ‘maternal commons’. This ending of enforced silencing can be a political act, countering the stigma caused by pathologising individual mothers and making visible how structural inequalities and governmental policies impact on the lives of the most vulnerable families in the UK.
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Historically, 'putting-children-first' dominates public and political discussion of child protection. We rarely see child-welfare-involved mothers in the public imagination and their voices are mostly unheard. Too often, these women are written out of history, ghosts to us, their voices lost while the lingering effects in the production of child protection remain unrecognised. This single case study examines the speech acts of a child-welfare-involved mother in conversation with the researcher. It is a study of power, maternal vulnerability and maternal agency. A contrapuntal, out-of-time close reading demonstrates the symbolic and literal of imagery and metaphor present in her account. Three concepts-maternal identity, dispossession and agency-shape its textual structure. Listening to her use of imagery and metaphor and collecting these scattered elements together allow different lines of thought to emerge. This kind of listening even in the strained circumstances of current child protection practice is possible and can be adapted to child protection conversations in other localities where the textual structure will be different but open to examination. There is no substitute for the voices of child-welfare-involved mothers if we are to ensure fairness and justice towards their participation in the practices of child protection. © 2017 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved.
Article
Although research has been sporadic, the available evidence indicates that gender is consistently associated with differentiated trajectories through homelessness in Europe. Women’s pathways through homelessness have been linked to domestic violence, women being ‘protected’ by welfare systems when dependent children are living with them and an apparently greater tendency for women to use and exhaust informal support, rather than homelessness or welfare services. This evidence is frequently disregarded in current European homelessness research, which often uses conceptualisa- tions, definitions and methodologies developed when homelessness was seen predominantly as a social problem among lone adult men. The sites at which homelessness is studied and the ways in which data are collected, limit accuracy of measurement and inhibit understanding, but, this paper contends, the real issues centre on how mainstream definitions of homelessness exclude women. Women, who lack any security of tenure, physical safety, privacy and whose living conditions are otherwise unacceptable – who are homeless – are too often outside the scope of contemporary European homelessness research. Drawing on recent UK studies and the wider European literature, this paper argues that there is a need to cease a longstanding focus on the streets, homelessness services and (predominantly) male experience and to look instead at the more nuanced interrelationships between gender and agency to fully understand the nature of homelessness in Europe.
Book
This book marks a critical contribution in assessing and extending the evidence base on the causes and consequences of women's homelessness. Drawing together work from Europe's leading homelessness scholars, it presents a multidisciplinary and comparative analysis of this acute social problem, including its relationship with domestic violence, lone parenthood, motherhood, health and well-being and women's experience of sustained and recurrent homelessness. Working from diverse perspectives, the authors look at the responses to women's homelessness in differing cultures and regions, and within various forms of welfare states. They focus in particular on relating the gender dimensions of welfare and social policy to women's experiences when they become homeless. This innovative and timely edited volume will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, social policy, anthropology, and gender and women's studies, along with international policy-makers.
Chapter
In Chapter 6, Mayock et al. examine the relationship between domestic violence and women’s homelessness with a comparative focus on the UK, Ireland and Portugal. It starts by discussing the relevance of the concept of ‘home’ for a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of domestic violence and homelessness. The intersections of domestic violence and homelessness are then interrogated with specific attention to the complex dynamics surrounding women’s paths ‘out of home’ and their subsequent experiences of homelessness and housing. The focus then shifts to a discussion of service responses to domestic violence and considers how, historically, domestic violence and homelessness have been separated. The consequences of this divide for women are highlighted and more recent policy innovations, particularly in the UK context, are examined. The chapter concludes by highlighting possible directions for future research on the role and impact of domestic violence and its relationship to women’s homelessness.
Chapter
In Chap. 2, O’Sullivan provides a historical analysis of the portrayal of homeless women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Surveying the social science literature, in addition to more popular accounts of homelessness, he argues that women were homeless in large numbers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but were rendered invisible as they largely utilized a range of female-only services that were usually not formally designated as services for the homeless. Thus, the broad consensus that women were rarely homeless in the past, to some degree, contemporaneously centres on the dominant methodological approaches to measuring homelessness. The chapter concludes that the lessons from the past resonate with the present. How we define homelessness remains contested and measuring homelessness by counting bodies in those facilities designed for the ‘homeless’ results in an emaciated and partial understanding of homelessness.
Chapter
Chapter 3 focuses on how ideas about gender and homelessness impact on homelessness policies, services and the situation of homeless women in Europe. The power of culturally specific definitions and images of homelessness is significant. Access to homelessness services and chances of women exiting homelessness appear to be conditional upon the perceived conduct of women in many European countries. The design and organization of services for homeless women, which are to a large extent based on gendered stereotypes, may serve to alienate women. There is a need for a European-wide research on homelessness and housing services for women that is participatory in orientation and privileges women’s experiences, to develop services that respect the autonomy and dignity of women. Equally, there is a need for policies that focus on women’s access to affordable housing and socio-economic opportunities and their rights, more broadly.
Article
Research linking social and penal policy has grown extensively in recent years. Wacquant (2009) suggests that retrenchment of welfare support and expansion of the penal system work together to bear down on marginalised populations in a ‘carceral–assistential net’. Empirical and theoretical examinations of these regimes are often underpinned by gendered assumptions. This article addresses this limitation by foregrounding the experiences of women; qualitative interviews offer an insight into their experiences at the intersection of welfare and criminal justice policy in austerity Britain. Their reflections make visible the complex, heterogeneous raft of social assistance, institutional neglect and intensive intervention that characterises women's experiences of the ‘carceral–assistential net’. The evidence presented suggests that for marginalised women interventions intensify once behaviour becomes problematic or in times of crisis. While some interventions are valued by those engaged there is little significant impact on their socio-economic position.
Article
This article explores how the child protection system currently operates in England. It analyses how policy and practice has developed, and articulates the need for an alternative approach. It draws from the social model as applied in the fields of disability and mental health, to begin to sketch out more hopeful and progressive possibilities for children, families and communities. The social model specifically draws attention to the economic, environmental and cultural barriers faced by people with differing levels of (dis)ability, but has not been used to think about ‘child protection’, an area of work in England that is dominated by a focus on risk and risk aversion. This area has paid limited attention to the barriers to ensuring children and young people are cared for safely within families and communities, and the social determinants of much of the harms they experience have not been recognised because of the focus on individualised risk factors.
Book
A child's disclosure of sexual abuse can wreak havoc in many lives, especially that of the child's mother. Julia Krane offers a first-hand look into everyday protection practices of child welfare from the perspective of mothers of sexually abused children and their female social workers, charting women's complex, contradictory, and often costly relations with the child welfare arm of the Canadian state Drawing on interviews with social workers and mothers of sexually abused children, examinations of client files and court documents, and reviews of training and procedural manuals, Krane argues that child welfare procedures designed to protect children and help parents instead end up scrutinizing mothers for their inadequacies, transforming them into a protective labour force expected to safeguard their children. Protection practices, she contends, essentially reproduce legacies of mother blame and responsibility for the child's sexual abuse, relieving the abuser and the state of all liability. In conclusion, Krane uses her analysis to identify areas with potential for change, such as creating practice environments that render explicit the gendered nature of protection, offering support to women in their protective efforts, and allowing opportunities for women to explore and reflect on the context of maternal care and protection. This study lays bare another layer of gender in relation to child sexual abuse, and locates child welfare practice in feminist scholarly debates about women and the welfare state.
Article
This article explores family members' perspectives on child protection interventions within the current neoliberal and punitive policy and practice contexts. The material is drawn from the 'Giving Poverty a Voice' social worker training project, a collaborative project involving family members and activists from ATD Fourth World (the international anti-poverty organisation), academics in the field of social work and practitioners, including social workers, lawyers and ATD Fourth World team members.
Article
Families in the UK have played a key role within the 'third way' policy regimes of the past two decades, promising to act as arenas of citizenship between the individual and the market. Such a framing has always posed questions about which families are imagined to be capable of this role, with competing constructions of 'risky' and 'resourceful' families within social policy discourses. Over the past five years UK families have been hit with an array of cuts and reforms to state benefits and other forms of government support. This paper argues that, within this context of austerity, problematic binary constructions in policy discourses are increasing. Certain families and households are relied on to deliver aspects of care, while others are vilified as unstable and 'troubled', in ways that view families as individualised and removed from their wider geographies. Against this background it is argued that detailed geographical research into the everyday lives of disadvantaged families can talk back to these powerful representations. This means paying attention to the ways that families navigate everyday landscapes of care, both material and emotional, which are in turn shaped by the unequal resources available, including increasingly unevenly distributed state services. © 2016 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
Article
The Big Society was one of the UK Prime Minister’s flagship policy ideas prior to his election in 2010 and has since become part of the UK coalition government’s legislative programme. A key aspect of the Big Society is to mend ‘societally Broken Britain’ by supporting families, as ‘strong families are the foundation of a bigger, stronger society’. However, in the aftermath of the riots of August 2011 in London and other parts of England, the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has suggested that parents of children who regularly truant need to be confronted and challenged and has proposed penalizing parents of truanting children by cutting their benefits. This article considers whether withholding benefits from families is an effective means of tackling antisocial behaviour or does this plan represent an ideological view of welfare recipients as being irresponsible and a commitment to the penalization of the socially excluded? This article will consider whether the Big Society truly offers the prospect of a new approach to young people and families deemed to be ‘in trouble’ or whether the August 2011 riots created the environment for justifying cuts in public spending by shifting responsibility for crime and crime control from the criminal justice system onto vulnerable young people and low-income families.
Article
Despite the development of much positive work by to tackle domestic violence, frustrations are often voiced by social care and other professionals - and echoed in women's and children's experiences - that it can be difficult to ensure and sustain safe outcomes for women and children in circumstances of domestic violence. The article takes as its starting point these frustrations and difficulties, and provides an attempt at understanding some of the systemic problems practitioners may be facing that undermine the effectiveness of their practice. The article explores in particular some of the tensions and contradictions that are evident in professional discourses and practices across work with victims and perpetrators of domestic violence; child protection and safeguarding; and child contact. These three areas of work are especially difficult to bring together into a cohesive and co-ordinated approach because they are effectively on separate 'planets' - with their own separate histories, culture, laws, and populations (sets of professionals). The notion of separate 'planets' can also be understood in light of what Bourdieu (1989) would call the 'habitus' of groups, where the particular structures, orientations and approaches in the work of a professional group may create divides between their own everyday and common place professional assumptions and practices and those of other professional groups. Tackling the 'three planet problem', and dealing more effectively with domestic violence as it impacts on adults and children, requires both a unified approach across the separate 'planet' areas and acknowledgement of the processes of gendering that are situating women as culpable victims. It requires much closer and coherent practices across the three areas of work, with acknowledgement and understanding of professional assumptions and practices of different professional groups.
Article
The condition of long-term homelessness has been demonstrated to affect a far smaller number of individuals compared with those who exit and become housed. It is nonetheless a pressing policy concern because of the high social and economic costs associated with prolonged homelessness. As with much homelessness research generally, gender is not adequately addressed, and frequently ignored, within analyses of ‘long-term’ or ‘chronic’ homelessness. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance and examines the experiences of women who have lengthy homeless histories based on the accounts of 34 women who are participants in a larger biographical study of homeless women in Ireland. Women's movements into and out of homeless service settings are examined in some detail, as are their accounts of the lived experience of prolonged homelessness. Their narratives reveal their mothering roles and identities, intimate relationships and intimate partner violence, and their ongoing interactions with institutional settings, including homeless hostels, as key dynamics influencing their movements and the strategies used by them as they attempt to manage their homelessness. We conclude by highlighting several gender-specific forces driving the women's experiences of unresolved homelessness. A number of key messages for policy are also discussed.
Article
This study explored mothers' perceptions of how homelessness and shelter life affected family relationships. Participants reported increased closeness and heightened quality and quantity of interaction with their children, but a disruption in their roles as disciplinarians and providers/caretakers. Factors which mothers perceived to affect relationships were shelter conditions (rules and interactions with staff and residents), the mother's emotional state, and the child's emotional state, temperament, and behavior. Implications for practice are suggested.
Article
This article provides insights into how the concept of vulnerability operates in welfare and disciplinary processes for young people who are considered ‘vulnerable’. It reports from empirical qualitative research conducted in a large city in England which included interviews with vulnerable young people and with professionals working with this group. Findings highlight that despite differences of opinion about what constitutes ‘vulnerability’, it is a popular and powerful conceptual mechanism which underpins the delivery of service interventions for certain young people. A relationship between vulnerability and ‘transgression’ is revealed, calling into question dichotomous representations of young people as either ‘vulnerable victims’ or ‘dangerous wrong-doers’. It is argued that whilst it can be utilised in the pursuit of more ‘caring’ interventions with those who are seen to be ‘in need’, vulnerability is also a concept relevant to debates concerning selective welfare systems and behavioural regulation.
Article
This article is about the city as home for people living in diaspora. We develop two key areas of debate. First, in contrast to research that explores diasporic homes in relation to domestic homemaking and/or the nation as home or ‘homeland’, we consider the city as home in diaspora. Second, building on research on transnational urbanism, translocality and the importance of the ‘city scale’ in migration studies, we argue that the city is a distinctive location of diasporic dwelling, belonging and attachment. Drawing on interviews with Anglo–Indian and Chinese Calcuttans who live in London and Toronto, we develop the idea of ‘diaspora cities’ to explore the importance of the city as home rather than the nation as ‘homeland’ for many people living in diaspora. This leads to an understanding of the importance of migration and diaspora within cities of departure as well as resettlement, and contributes a distinctively diasporic focus to broader work on comparative urbanism.
Article
This paper will attempt to situate the current discourse on 'crack pregnancies' within the context of a broader regulatory discourse.' It will argue that defining and locating state intervention solely within the confines of formal legal discourse not only privileges the criminal law, but (1) occludes recognition of the ways in which regulation and control are effected by administrative law and welfare policy and (2) fails to specify the role of the welfare state in the construction and reproduction of dominant cultural norms of womanhood and mothering. The paper draws on feminist literature and fieldwork-in-progress to suggest that many of these women are already subject to substantial mechanisms of social control and cultural reproduction. In concluding, it is suggested that the construction of this debate to date has served to deflect attention away from the fissures of gender, race and class that render these women's lives as publicly problematic.
Article
This article reviews literature on the concept of 'place' and discusses its relevance to housing research. The article begins by providing a working definition of place before embarking upon an examination of the connections between place and identity. The nature of such attachments to place is examined through the work of Martin Heidegger (1973) and Pierre Bourdieu (1979). The relationship between place attachment and the volatile political-economy of place construction is subsequently discussed. The paper then continues with an outline of the importance of the concept of 'place' for housing researchers and concludes with some suggestions for further research. While discussions about 'place' have been a key preoccupation of geographers for some decades, housing researchers have barely touched on the subject. Yet, at the present time - a time of increasing migration, expanding urbanization, and swelling investments in place-construction (ranging from individual real-estate sales to city and regional re-developments) - the importance of the concept of place for housing researchers has come to the fore. The literature on 'place', especially the literature which sees 'home' as a particularly significant type of place, provides insight into the relationship between places and people's identities and psychological well-being; the dynamics of conflicts surrounding home-places; and the political-economy of home places. It also points to the need for a more integrated approach to housing research that looks beyond the scale of individual households to the regional, national and international scale.
Article
Recent recognition of the effects of domestic violence on children has given rise to calls for collaborative interventions between the arenas of child protection and domestic violence. Amidst this flurry of activity, little serious consideration has been given to the subjectivity of mothers who are simultaneously involved with child protection agencies and battered women’s shelters. Without explicit engagement of mothers as subjects in their own right, collaboration has the potential to exacerbate their already trying circumstances. Our paper reviews the child protection context in which women as mothers are simultaneously relegated to the periphery of concern and called upon to act as ‘mother protectors’ in response to children at risk. We then explore mothering in the context of domestic violence and their relative invisibility in shelter settings. We conclude with a call to render women’s experiences of domestic violence and mothering both visible and supported in these collaborative efforts.
Article
Media driven interpretations of fear and risk have failed to notify the general public that the most likely victims of violence are females who are attacked by a male partner. Domestic violence is pervasive throughout virtually all cultures, occurring across all social classes, all ethnic groups, and all age groups. Yet the true extent of domestic violence is generally agreed to be unknown. Domestic violence is a private fear and as is shown within this paper the search for sanctuary spaces that are offered by refuges is an important component in the acquisition of safe places. However, this paper examines how the ‘professionalisation’ of some refuges as well as other processes of institutionalisation may have had a negative impact upon the victims of abuse and violence.
Article
Many homeless women become separated from their children. The purpose of this study is to determine the predictors of entering a shelter with or without children and predictors of being separated from one or more children. Further, the authors also seek to understand the unique experience of homeless mothers separated from children. Findings suggest that women with mental illnesses and those separated from children are less likely to enter the shelter with children. Special needs were not significant predictors for being separated from any children. Focus group findings elucidate the pain separated mothers endure.