“Why should we have to move everywhere and everything because of him?” – Change, Justice, Fairness Report 2015.
In May 2013, in a church hall in Kirkcaldy a group of women came to a meeting held by Scottish Women’s Aid to find out about a participatory research project. The research was to look at women’s experiences of becoming homeless because of domestic abuse – the leading cause of women’s homelessness in Scotland, both then and now. We invited women with lived experience of domestic abuse to volunteer to learn new skills, design and carry out research to identify the issues and find solutions for preventing homelessness, informing policy and improving responses from housing providers.
Over the next two and a half years, a determined and courageous group of women did just that. In church halls and community centres, on most weeks, come rain or shine they worked together as volunteer community researchers to design and carry out a research project supported by staff from Scottish Women’s Aid. They decided the focus of the research, identified what they still needed to know about other women’s experiences and how housing policy and practitioners responded to domestic abuse. And they identified the best ways to get that information – reliably and with integrity. They used their shared understanding of women’s experiences to highlight the key findings, conclusions and recommendations and to co-produce a research report published in December 2015.
As the community researchers said at the time,
“We came together as a group of women from different backgrounds and life experiences and began sharing our stories – we found strong similarities in how we had been treated. We were determined to prevent other women and children in the future from having to live through what happened to us. We had done nothing wrong but were forced to leave our home, either by the perpetrator or by the housing system that expected us and our children to become homeless.”
A key recommendation identified by the researchers was the need for new legislation to protect women and their children’s rights to remain in their home by placing conditions on perpetrators of domestic abuse, including removing them from the home. This legislation would provide the space and opportunity for support to be made available to allow women to consider their future housing options.
This recommendation has now been realised in the Domestic Abuse (Protection) (Scotland) Bill – an outstanding achievement for those community researchers and a great outcome after decades of campaigning from Scotland’s women’s sector to improve housing outcomes for women, children and young people who have experienced domestic abuse. The Bill marks a critical shift in in preventing women’s homelessness by removing and barring the perpetrator from the home and gives social landlords greater control to transfer tenancies to a victim/survivor, upholding women’s rights to remain in her home. The Bill reaches its final stage of scrutiny when it is debated in the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday 17th March and we strongly urge all MSPs to support it.
As one of the community researchers said about the Bill:
“At last women get to remain in their own home, don’t have to relocate to a new area where they don’t know anybody, when at such a difficult time they need their family and friends around them – and men are finally being held accountable for their actions. We once asked as a group, why can’t the perpetrator be removed? Well now it’s here, totally brilliant.”
