There is a high level of diversity between, and within, the at-risk groups and communities that are the focus of this report. Consequently, there is significant variation in the contexts in which DFV occurs, as well as its impact. This chapter begins by examining the issue of housing, which impacts on all at-risk groups and communities. The following sections provide an overview on the evidence on prevalence and impact in relation to each group. The strength of evidence regarding the prevalence and impact of DFV in each of the at- risk groups and communities is variable.
3.1
DFV and housing
Housing is a critical issue for all people who have experienced DFV. It impacts particularly on women and children; DFV is a major contributor to women and children’s homelessness (Barrett Meyering & Edwards, 2012; Oberin & Mitra-Kahn, 2013). Housing issues tend to be dealt with during the tertiary response to DFV. Until recently, women (and their children) escaping violence have tended to leave their homes. Increasingly, however, polices and practices that aim to enable women to remain in their homes after experiencing DFV have been developed in many Australian jurisdictions (Barrett Meyering & Edwards, 2012). These initiatives can be categorised as secondary prevention because a central aim of such initiatives is to reduce future violence (Oberin & Mitra-Kahn, 2013). The development of these policies and practices has been in response to the acknowledgment that a lack of housing options may mean that women stay in, or return to, violence. Finding new accommodation may also have many other negative consequences for women and children leaving violence, such as:
removal from established support networks;
impinging on the capacity for women to continue to work or to seek work; disruption of children’s education if there is a need to change schools;
financial hardship arising from, for example, a loss of possessions, moving costs and/or storage costs; and
poorer quality replacement housing due to housing availability and affordability issues, which has several flow-on effects, such as:
– poorer physical conditions of housing and surrounding neighbourhood; and – poorer safety of housing (Barrett Meyering & Edwards, 2012).
Safe at Home programs have been implemented in a number of states and territories in Australia (Barrett Meyering & Edwards, 2012; Spinney, Blandy, & Hulse, 2013). The UK’s Sanctuary Schemes project, introduced in 2002, has been an influential model in the development of similar programs in Australia (Barrett Meyering & Edwards, 2012). Most programs consist of a range of elements that include stabilising a woman’s housing through advocacy, increased safety of the house, and the legal exclusion of perpetrators (Barrett Meyering & Edwards, 2012). Existing research indicates that current programs are effective in meeting women’s needs and achieving program objectives (Mackay, 2011; Spinney, 2012). Spinney et al. (2013) found that successful Stay at Home programs are well
integrated in the broad range of DFV response and support services, such as the police and judicial system, legal support and counselling.
Questions have been raised about how appropriate such programs are for the at-risk groups and communities that are the focus of this report. For some at-risk groups, the program may be particularly useful. For instance, programs such as NSW’s Staying Home Leaving Violence prioritise women with disabilities. This reflects the fact that for women with disabilities leaving their home may be especially challenging, particularly where there are adaptations to their home and equipment that accommodate for their disability. Short- term accommodation (such as in refuges) may not be able to provide appropriate support for women with disabilities, meaning that they cannot be accommodated or that accommodation is not as safe or comfortable as it should be. Finding longer-term accommodation that meets the needs of women with disabilities and/or adapting housing and replacing equipment is both disruptive and expensive. While not all women with disabilities may currently receive the support they need to stay in their own homes under such programs, the prioritisation of their needs is positive. This issue is further discussed in section 6.3.
However, the needs of other at-risk groups may not be so well met by such programs. For instance, CALD women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are particularly likely to lack information about their legal rights to stay in their home and so may not actively seek access to such programs (Spinney et al., 2013). For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, in particular, it has been suggested that the focus needs to be on providing culturally appropriate support that enables women to stay in their community (Barrett Meyering & Edwards, 2012). In some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, there are differing understandings of what constitutes “home” (Memmott, Nash, Balfour, & Greenop, 2013). There may be a high level of mobility between houses in a community as well as highly fluctuating number of visitors from other locations (Memmott et al., 2013). Exclusion of perpetrators may not be practicable or culturally appropriate in these contexts. Women may not want to stay in the house they normally live in due to highly stressful, overcrowded environments (Memmott et al., 2013).2
Another issue for women in at-risk groups is housing affordability. While the emphasis in Stay at Home programs is on women staying in their home, and many programs incorporate some level of financial support, in the long term, women may have difficulty meeting rental or mortgage payments after leaving their relationship (Barrett Meyering, 2012). This is an issue that impacts on all women, but especially those from some at-risk groups. For instance, women with disabilities, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and CALD women, in particular, are often more financially marginalised than other women. These issues highlight that any Safe at Home program needs to take into account the specificity of the issues in any community in which it is being implemented.
2 It should be noted, however, that crowding and overcrowding are not fixed concepts, and that a high number of people in a household does not automatically correlate to perceptions of a stressful housing situation by those living in such households (Memmott et al., 2013).
3.2
Prevalence and key issues
3.2.1
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women
Prevalence
A large body of evidence, accumulated over many years, demonstrates that violence, and in particular DFV, occurs at significantly higher rates in some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities than in non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities (Day, Francisco & Jones, 2013). It is important to keep in mind, however, that there is a great degree of diversity within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. DFV does not affect all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities equally.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are overrepresented in homicide statistics. In figures from 2008–09 and 2009–10, they were approximately four times more likely to be the victims of homicide than their non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander counterparts (Chan & Payne, 2013). More than half (55%) were killed in a domestic dispute, of which the most common subcategory was intimate partner violence (Chan & Payne, 2013). Family violence disproportionally impacts on women in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in comparison with their male counterparts. Based on 2006–07 figures, female Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander victims of homicide were killed by an intimate partner or family member in 73% of cases, in contrast to 41% of their male counterparts (Dearden & Jones, 2008).
The proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who had been victims of physical or threatened violence in the previous 12 months did not change significantly between 2002 and 2008, and remained around twice the proportion of non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare [AIHW], 2011). In 2008–09, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women were 31 times more likely to be hospitalised for injuries caused by assault than other women (AIHW, 2011; Day et al., 2013). In remote areas, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were hospitalised as a consequence of family violence 35.6 times more than non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (AIHW, 2011; Day et al., 2013).