3Social work research and homelessness
This chapter critically examines research literature in the fields of social work, homelessness and intersectionality. I begin the chapter by locating homelessness literature in social work journals from the USA, UK, Australia and European Union that have drawn on aspects of intersectionality, followed by a discussion of multidisciplinary literature. As there is a dearth of social work literature on homelessness that engages with intersectionality, I highlight my own recent Australian intersectional research projects that explore experiences of home and homelessness. I advocate for further social work research that centralises intersectionality and argue that intersectional social work research can contribute to constructing more complex and dynamic understandings of social work responses to homelessness.
There is a burgeoning amount of research literature in the area of homelessness, particularly from the USA, Canada, UK and Australia. Even in the 1990s, Johnson and Cnaan (1995, p. 361) concluded that in North America ‘homelessness is one of the most studied social problems in the last decade’. However, despite attempts to count numbers, construct definitions, examine causes and calculate costs, homelessness is considerably diverse and difficult to enumerate and measure (Jencks, 1994; Johnson, 1995; Williams and Cheal, 2001). Early social science and sociological research on homelessness emerged from the American context, focusing on marginalised and disaffiliated social groups, such as ‘hobos’ living in skid row areas, often in inner city locations (Anderson, 1923) and later, documented activist social movements and social protests in the field of homelessness (Wright, 1997). UK and Australian policy scholars have particularly advocated a critical, social constructionist approach to homelessness that combines structural and individual explanations and solutions to homelessness, focusing on different pathways for entering and exiting homelessness (Hutson and Clapham, 1999; Pleace, 2000; Clapham, 2005; Johnson et al., 2008). In this chapter, I discuss social work literature on homelessness and intersectionality and multidisciplinary literature on homelessness from different countries. Finally, I discuss my own intersectional research on home and homelessness.
Social work research, homelessness and intersectionality
To obtain a general indication of the engagement of social work literature with homelessness and intersectionality, I completed an online search of key social work journals from the US, UK, Europe and Australia, using the terms ‘homeless’ and ‘intersectionality’ (including book reviews, editorials and opinion pieces). From their inceptions, the social work journals have published research on homelessness. However, intersectionality was less common. For example, in America, Social Work (Journal of the National Association of Social Workers) (1959–2015) published 370 articles that mentioned the word ‘homeless’, with ten articles mentioning intersectionality. One practice article focused on domestic violence fatality reviews, intersectionality and homeless services (Chanmugam, 2014). In the journal Research on Social Work Practice (1991–2015) I found 163 articles mentioning ‘homeless’, with nine using the term intersectionality. One article on black men’s mental health referred to homelessness and intersectionality (Watkins et al., 2015). Finally, Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work (1986–2015) published the highest number of articles mentioning ‘intersectionality’ at 112 articles (mostly in the 2000s), and over 160 articles that mentioned the word ‘homeless’. In Britain, the British Journal of Social Work (Journal of the British Association of Social Workers) (1971–2015) published 314 articles mentioning the word ‘homeless’, with 33 containing the word ‘intersectionality’. Two journal articles discussed an intersectional analysis of the experiences of refugee mothers and South Asian women facing domestic violence and also mentioned homelessness (Anitha, 2010; Vervliet et al., 2014). The Journal of Social Work (2001–2015) published 51 articles with the word ‘homeless’, with six using the term ‘intersectionality’. One article on discourses about girls in Israel included brief references to intersectionality and homelessness (Krumer-Nevo et al., 2015). In Australia, Australian Social Work (Journal of the Australian Association of Social Workers) (1948–2015) published 230 articles with the term ‘homeless’ and four with the word ‘intersectionality’. Social work education journals were also searched. For example, the UK journal Social Work Education (1981–2015) published 136 articles with the term ‘homeless’ and 24 with the term ‘intersectionality’ and three articles that mentioned both. As well, Advances in Social Work and Welfare Education (Australian and New Zealand Social Work and Welfare Education and Research Journal) was included on the Informit data base in 2011, and since then, one article has been published on homelessness, which did not contain the term ‘intersectional’ (Horsell, 2013). In 2009, I also wrote a paper on teaching about homelessness and children in this journal (Zufferey, 2009b) but this was before it went online in 2011, and I also did not mention intersectionality. In Europe, the European Journal of Social Work (1998–2016) had over 120 articles with the term ‘homeless’ and five articles that mentioned intersectionality (mostly from 2010 onwards). Two articles mentioned both. Graham and Schiele (2010) compared the equality-of-oppressions paradigm in the USA and the anti-discriminatory framework in the UK, and argued that there has been a declining emphasis on racism in contemporary social work education. In Denmark, Bak and Larsen (2015, p. 15) conducted an inter-categorical quantitative analysis to compare the ‘cumulative disadvantage’ and poverty individualisation theses, and found that ‘class-based explanations and explanations of the individualisation of poverty are less useful than the intersection between structural positions and individual biographies’.
This brief search of key social work journals does indicate that social work literature has historically engaged with homelessness and, more recently, with intersectionality. Intersectional approaches have emerged particularly in social work feminist literature (such as in Affilia). Intersectionality is also a recent entry in the Encyclopaedia of Social Work (Yamada et al., 2015). However, there is a dearth of articles on intersectional approaches to homelessness in social work literature. In general, social work literature on homelessness has tended to examine and provide evidence for improvements in system and service delivery practices and policies. Further research drawing on intersectional social work approaches would contribute to this literature, by emphasising the intersecting complexities and diversities that constitute the social inequalities of homelessness.
Recently, in the British Journal of Social Work, Manthorpe et al. (2015, p. 587) called for the social work profession to ‘articulate more clearly the potential for social work support to improve outcomes’ for people at risk of or experiencing homelessness. Homelessness cannot be avoided in social work practice with ‘at risk’ young people, children, families and adults (Manthorpe et al., 2015). In the UK, social work research literature on homelessness has tended to be qualitative, such as gathering young homeless people’s perspectives of care (De Winter and Noom, 2003), and examining the spatialised politics of belonging for racialised homeless young people (Crath, 2012). Australian social work articles also tended to be qualitative, addressing the following neglected categories and vulnerable groups: pregnant homeless young women (Bessant, 2003), women and violence (Murray, 2011), homeless men (Roche, 2015), homeless fathers (McArthur et al., 2006), homeless ‘careers’ and pathways such as youth, housing or family breakdown (Chamberlain and Mackenzie, 2006), and older people and homelessness (Lipmann, 2009). Homelessness research has frequently examined a particular homelessness ‘characteristic’, such as drug and alcohol addictions (see Johnson and Chamberlain, 2008) or mental illness. As well, with the introduction of social inclusion/exclusion policies in Europe, the UK and Australia, social exclusion and homelessness is increasingly being analysed (Kennett and Marsh, 1999; Anderson, 2003; Horsell, 2006; 2014).
When theorising social policy, homelessness and social work researchers have played a role in critically examining political trends, such as social inclusion/exclusion policy discourses (Horsell, 2006). In Europe, Belgian authors in social welfare studies Maeseele et al. (2014) examined historical shifts in changing responses to homelessness. They found that the welfare approach to ‘vagrancy’ was reconstructed as responding to the social problem of homelessness. They also found that the conceptual shift from the criminal problem of vagrancy to homelessness as a poverty problem was ‘accompanied by an emphasis on a psycho-social approach to homelessness’ (Maeseele et al., 2014, p. 1717). Similar to other European countries, social workers in Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium) have a mandate to intervene in homelessness. However, according to Maeseele et al. (2014, p. 1717) social work responses to homelessness are ‘made increasingly conditional’ because of the tightening ‘accessibility of social services for homeless people’.
Social work journals included articles about social work methods of practice in the field of homelessness by authors from different countries, such as outreaching to ‘rough sleepers’ in Australia (Parsell, 2011), and the role of social work in ‘streetwork’ from Israel (Szeintuch, 2015). These journal articles presented evaluations of a practice approach, such as case management with young people (Grace and Gill, 2014), of a service, such as accommodation services (McLaughlin, 2011) and day centres as sanctuaries for the ‘undeserving’ (Bowpitt et al., 2014, p. 1251). Occasionally, social workers examined neglected geographical locations, such as global/local or urban/rural issues (Sandberg, 2013). In the European Union, there has been a recent emphasis on ‘internal’ migrants who are experiencing homelessness (Fitzpatrick et al., 2012; Mostowska, 2014).
Intersectionality has been taken up by feminist social work scholars, in particular. The search for the words ‘intersectionality’, ‘intersectional’ and ‘intersect’ in the feminist journal Affilia with the SAGE database (1986–2015) yielded over 200 articles (including book reviews and editorials), the largest number in social work journal articles. Of these, eight articles mentioned both ‘homeless’ and ‘intersection’ but the topics were diverse and the research did not necessarily use intersectionality as a frame or for an analysis.
Qualitative research articles in Affilia that mentioned intersectionality and homelessness included research with social workers, and with women ‘at risk’ of experiencing homelessness (Zufferey, 2009a; Broussard et al., 2012; Rich, 2014). My article, on how social workers’ bodies and identities are gendered, classed and racialised when responding to homelessness, is discussed further in Chapter 5. Two other research articles made visible the experiences of women who lived with a disability, in poverty, with intimate partner violence and were at risk of homelessness (Broussard et al., 2012; Rich, 2014). Homelessness was mentioned in narrative research interviews with 19 women with disabilities who experienced intimate partner violence (Rich, 2014). In this study, American social worker Karen Rich (2014, p. 418) intersected gender, victimisation and disability discourses that shaped women’s perceptions of IPV, and found that these ‘accounts tended to bolster a stereotypically feminine (gendered, nurturant, or sexual) identity’. In another study on the coping skills of 12 poor women who raised their children alone, their experiences of and increasing risk of abuse and homelessness was mentioned briefly (Broussard et al., 2012). These qualitative analyses of narrative interviews were consistent with Danish sociologists Christensen and Jensen’s (2012, p. 144) suggestions, that a life story narrative analysis is useful to capture intersections in social structures and institutions, and to show how social identity categories (or locations) intersect in the ‘discursive construction of meaning’.
Few quantitative studies were found in the feminist social work journal Affilia that mentioned the words ‘homeless’ and ‘intersection’. One article examined associations between depression and three forms of intimate partner violence – economic, physical/sexual and emotional abuse (Voth Schrag, 2015), using data from 3,282 women with children, interviewed in waves 4 and 5 of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (Voth Schrag, 2015). It found that economic and physical abuse was partially mediated by depression and had strong correlations with later experiences of material hardship, including homelessness (Voth Schrag, 2015). The researcher argued that intimate partner violence advocates (such as social workers) would do well to consider the added risks associated with economic abuse intersecting with racism, sexism, classism, poverty and other structural inequalities (Voth Schrag, 2015, p. 350). One further article examined ambivalent sexism theory and abortion attitudes, intersecting socio-demographic categories according to religion, age, gender and race/ethnicity (Begun and Walls, 2015) – but this article did not identify homelessness except in one author’s biography. Experimental quantitative studies (such as randomised control trials) are not common in social work literature on homeless population groups, as they are often transient and difficult to locate.
One mixed-method study published in Affilia that mentioned ‘intersection’ and ‘homeless’ researched female heads of households who relied on welfare, and the multilayered barriers they faced in their attempts to obtain employment (Bowie and Dopwell, 2013). This study documented the oppressive racialised and gendered experiences of 30 female respondents, aged 25–34, who were of African American and Latino background (Bowie and Dopwell, 2013, p. 190) using intersectionality. In the USA, in 2007, African Americans and Latinos constituted 12.6 per cent and 16.3 per cent of the population, respectively – but they accounted for 35.5 per cent and 27 per cent of the 1.7 million accessing ‘Temporary Assistance for Needy Families’ (TANF) (Bowie and Dopwell, 2013). This journal article is further discussed in more detail in the policy chapter, Chapter 4.
Two further articles examined the constructions of policy programmes and the design and delivery of services (Goodkind, 2005; Kennedy, 2008). For example, Goodkind (2005) reviewed assumptions about the increasing numbers of girls in the juvenile justice system and provided a feminist critique of how service responses essentialise gender, reify categories of gender, race, class and sexuality and reinforce gendered norms, therefore locating problems within individuals (not structures) and focusing on girls’ victimisation and punishment (Goodkind, 2005, p. 52). As well, Kennedy (2008) provides a history of social workers’ responses to young women and eugenics (improving genetics) by examining issues of gender, race, ethnicity and class simultaneously. However, homelessness and/or intersections are mentioned only briefly in these articles. Whilst Broussard et al. (2012) and Bowie and Dopwell (2013) explored female-headed households living in poverty (some who experienced homelessness and substandard housing), and Zufferey (2009) examined social work responses to homelessness, none of these articles specifically researched intersecting power relations, in regard to the perspectives of people who experienced ‘homelessness’. Therefore, I conclude that previous social work research does not emphasise homelessness and intersectionality (or intersectional feminism), and that the experiences of people affected by homelessness require further attention.
In the Journal of Poverty, Norris et al. (2010) explored poverty research in rural areas. They argued that an intersectional perspective would make visible ‘the complexity of people’s social locations by conceptualizing race, class, gender as simultaneously interacting power relations’ (Norris et al., 2010, p. 55). They observe that there are:
Three tendencies in rural poverty scholarship: (a) a tendency to acknowledge the importance of race, gender, or age in shaping rural poverty; (b) a tendency to separate race, gender, and age; and (c) a tendency to treat them as descriptive variables and not as power relationships.
(Norris et al., 2010, p. 57)
This article makes a case for examining poverty from an intersectional perspective that acknowledges power relations – but it does not discuss homelessness and social work in depth, except by implication.
Multidisciplinary literature on homelessness in the USA, UK and Europe
As previously noted, research literature on homelessness has different emphases in different countries (Fitzpatrick and Christian, 2006), with a changing emphasis over time. The USA has the largest research literature on homelessness in the English-speaking world, with Britain second. In 2003, the Journal of Community and Applied Psychology published a Special Issue on Homelessness: Integrating International Perspectives, edited by Julie Christian and Isobel Anderson, who argued that ‘psychology together with other disciplines such as sociology, geography and policy studies can be complementary in meeting the challenges of researching, evaluating and understanding the issues’ (Christian, 2003, p. 85). However, as evident in this quote, social work was not included as a discipline that can contribute to researching homelessness.
In Britain, social policy authors in housing studies tended to dominate academic research on housing and homelessness policy (Burrows et al., 1997; Kennett and Marsh, 1999; Pleace, 2000; Anderson, 2003), including social exclusion (Kennett and Marsh, 1999). Social policy literature on homelessness has focused on key policy and legislation changes, including the decriminalisation of vagrancy, deinstitutionalisation policies and changing housing and welfare policies (Kennett and Marsh, 1999; Jones, 2013). Homelessness literature has included social relations related to class, gender (Watson and Austerberry, 1986; Doherty, 2001) and race (Harrison, 1999). In the 1990s, UK academics covering homelessness were in the fields of health (Klee and Reid, 1998), sociology and ex-service men (Higate, 1997), criminology (Carlen, 1996) and socio-legal studies (Cowan, 1999). By the 1990s, homelessness was also beginning to be theorised as a multi-dimensional, social construct (Somerville, 1992; Hutson and Liddiard, 1994; Jacobs et al., 1999). However, social work was generally not considered in this literature.
In the EU, The European Observatory on Homelessness was founded by the European Federation of European Organisations Working with the Homeless (FEANTSA) to conduct transnational research on homelessness and housing exclusion. More recently, research collaborations between housing scholars in the UK and other countries in the EU are common (Doherty et al., 2004; O’Sullivan et al., 2010). As well, the connection between internal and global migration and homelessness is of increasing concern in UK and EU literature (Pleace, 2010). As discussed in the next chapter, few European authors such as Bezunartea-Barrio (2014) and Benjaminsen (2014) have explored the changing roles of social workers in a changing European social and political context.
In the USA, homelessness has been researched in anthropological and sociological studies (Snow and Anderson, 1987; Wright, 1988; Wright, 1997; Wright and Rubin, 1991), economics (Quigley et al., 2001), as well as social science, law and psychology (Rossi, 1989a; 1989b; Blasi, 1990). In America, the term ‘homeless’ was not widely used until the late 1970s when social advocate Mitch Snyder argued that millions of Americans were homeless (Jencks, 1994, p. 1). Traditionally, literature in the field of homelessness focused on individual characteristics and economic inequalities, such as poverty (Blau, 1992), deviancy, class relations, and men in ‘skid row’ hotels, particularly highlighting alcohol abuse (Rossi, 1989a; 1989b; Jencks, 1994). Psychological and medical perspectives have tended to dominate homeless research (Shinn and Weitzman, 1990). This prominence may be linked to welfare provision arrangements, where health-oriented responses and disciplines are common.
Quantitative studies have also dominated the US research landscape on homelessness, examining differences (such as age, gender and race) as descriptive variables (Norris et al., 2010). Canadian sociologist and social development scholar Peressini (2009, p. 13) quantitatively tested the heterogeneous hypothesis of homelessness, by examining age, gender, marital status, ethnicity and education, and found that ‘homelessness due to poverty, interpersonal conflict, health, and addictions vary considerably by age, while gender affects the likelihood of reporting interpersonal conflict, health problems, and housing issues’. Whilst these inter-categorical studies are useful for understanding how social discriminations contribute to homelessness, quantitative studies tend not to discuss micro–macro power relation and intersecting social inequalities in great depth.
Dating back to the 1980s, there has been considerable work undertaken by US social policy researchers, such as Dennis Culhane and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, on costing supportive housing, as well as programme evaluations for people who experience chronic homelessness, mental illness, health issues and disabilities, including veterans and at-risk children and families (Culhane et al., 2002; Culhane, 2008). Moreover, there have been numerous quantitative and qualitative evaluations of Housing First services for people who experience homelessness, with co-occurring serious mental illness and substance abuse (Padgett et al., 2006). As discussed in the next chapter (Chapter 4), particularly since the introduction of Housing First initiatives, the changing role and ‘treatment first’ ‘mindset’ of social workers in responding to homelessness has been taken up in the European context (Benjaminsen, 2014, p. 12). Social work authors such as Benjaminsen (2014) argue that Housing First is a social justice and human rights issue for people who experience homelessness and that this approach resonates with social work ethics and values. However, I note that these studies have not attended to or incorporated intersectionality.
In contrast to the USA, the welfare state in Britain has tended to fund smaller social policy-oriented research (Fitzpatrick and Christian, 2006). British research on homelessness has drawn upon interpretive, social constructionist and critical approaches (Jacobs et al., 1999). This literature has been synthesised by Fitzpatrick and Christian (2006), who argue that there are lessons for each country. For example, they report that Britain needs more robust quantitative longitudinal research with careful sampling and comparisons groups, whilst the USA needs more critical reflection, qualitative and policy impact research (Fitzpatrick and Christian, 2006). Whilst there is some resistance to psychological approaches within British social policy research, due to concerns about ‘individualising’ social problems and ‘pathologising’ disadvantaged groups, Fitzpatrick and Christian (2006, p. 325) argue that these studies can provide insights into individual cognition, emotion and motivation. The disciplinary backgrounds of researchers inevitably shape how research on homelessness is constructed, with implications for how intersectionality is used (or not).
Furthermore, Bacchi (2009) examined the role played by academic researchers in the processes of knowledge production and the relationship between researchers and policy makers. She makes a strong case for all researchers (including social workers), to pay greater critical attention to the effects of the evidence-based policy paradigm. Social workers engaged in policy research are often positioned as ‘social scientists’ that are simply delivering ‘evidence’ on questions and priorities set by governments, especially if the research is funded by governments. This positioning makes it difficult to subject policy priorities and problem representations to scrutiny, and to reflect more broadly on their implications (Bacchi, 2009), and their unintended consequences.
Homelessness research (particularly in the British context but also in Australia) has been criticised for becoming too closely aligned with policy funding and agendas, shaping the construction of ‘special’ categories of homelessness, such as young people, rough sleepers, women and older people (Pleace and Quilgars, 2003). This research then informs policy processes about ‘homeless pathways’, including mental health, domestic violence, housing crises, substance abuse and youth pathways (Johnson et al., 2008). However, as discussed in Chapter 5, the gendered, sexualised, racialised and classed power relations inherent in institutionalised practices and the categorisation of client identities, and managerialist approaches (such as case management) in social work organisations can create ethical dilemmas for social workers in the field of homelessness (Horsell, 2006; Zufferey, 2008).
Lastly, homelessness and social work research and literature has been dominated by individual and/or structural debates (Pleace and Quilgars, 2003; Chamberlain et al., 2014). Individual risk factors, or ‘characteristics’ of people who are defined as homeless, are constructed as being associated with poverty, having disabilities, abusing drugs and alcohol, experiencing mental illness, emotional and psychological distress, low levels of education, limited employment options and engaging in criminal activity. Whilst research has examined structural causes of homelessness, people who experience homelessness are often perceived and responded to within an ‘individual sickness’ paradigm (Wasserman and Clair, 2010, p. 8). Structural explanations of homelessness have included deinstitutionalisation policies, changes in the labour market, declining affordable housing options, changing family structures and low wages. As well, economic inequalities, patriarchal systems and gendered citizenship have been associated with domestic and family violence contributing to women’s homelessness (Zufferey et al., 2016). Social workers have combined structural and individual considerations in their engagement with the social justice values of social work, which informs their activist responses to homelessness (Zufferey, 2008). However, Wasserman and Clair (2010) have argued that this individualist-structural debate misses the mark on key concerns for people who are actually experiencing homelessness. As further discussed in Chapter 6, I centre the perspectives of diverse groups of people who experience homelessness, consistent with a social work and intersectional commitment to the pursuit of social justice. In this book I posit that intersectional social work research can emphasise both structural and individual or macro and micro power relations, by examining intersecting social processes and political institutions that continue to shape social inequalities.
Although not all in social work, there is also considerable historical and contemporary literature in the area of women’s homelessness. This has included: researching characteristics of homeless women (Johnson and Kreuger, 1989) and homeless families (Johnson, 1989; Stewart and Steward, 1992; Shinn and Weitzman, 1996), advocating for strengths and feminist approaches to women’s homelessness (Johnson and Richards, 1995; Boes and van Wormer, 1997), documenting the narratives and lived experiences of ‘homeless’ women (Williams, 2003; Scott, 2007; Casey et al., 2008) and children (Moore et al., 2011), exploring domestic and childhood violence and homelessness (Nyamathi et al., 1999), exploring the effects of domestic violence on increasing women’s risk of homelessness (Murray, 2011), emphasising the role of intimate partner violence in relationships and pathways out of and into homelessness (Williams, 1998; Jones et al., 2012), emphasising survival and sex work (Harding and Hamilton, 2009; Watson, 2011), documenting the difficulties of mothering when homeless (Connolly, 2000; Jasinski et al., 2010), questioning gendered constructs of home and identity (Wardhaugh, 1999) and in policy (Paterson, 2010), examining women’s access to housing, trajectories and life histories from a feminist approach (Watson and Austerberry, 1986; Tomas and Dittmar, 1995; Watson, 2000), promoting feminist social work practice in the area of homelessness (Watson and Austerberry, 1986; Johnson and Richards, 1995) and highlighting structural factors such as inequalities in the labour market and the feminisation of poverty (Pearce, 1978; Baptista, 2010). Ethnographic studies in this field have also been common, examining subjective understandings of homelessness, survival strategies and the broader (gendered) political and social aspects of home and homelessness (Russell, 1991; Snow and Anderson, 1993; Liebow, 1995; Passaro, 1996; Wright, 1997; Wardhaugh, 1999). Research drawing on intersectionality has tended to focus on domestic violence (Sokoloff and Dupont, 2005; Nixon and Humphreys, 2010), including domestic violence in social work (Laing and Humphreys, 2013) and women’s homelessness in Australia (Martin, 2014). However, these studies that take an intersectional approach have not examined homelessness and social work practices more broadly.
Women’s experiences of becoming homeless differ from those of men because they are more likely to be subjected to childhood abuse and intimate partner violence, experience trauma and psychological distress, be the main care provider for children, be living in poverty and use informal supports such as family and friends, before accessing a service or sleeping rough (Zufferey et al., 2016). However, these experiences potentially differ across racial/ethnic groups of women, class, sexuality, ability and geographical location, to name some social markers. Quantitative studies on homelessness have tended to focus on ethnicity, race, gender and economic inequalities as variables in research. However, these studies do not tend to theorise the findings within unequal power relations, using intersectionality. For example, in the USA, psychologists Nyamathi et al. (1999) compared socio-demographic, behavioural, victimisation and psychological differences among 448 homeless women and their male partners in the context of the prevention of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The majority of the women and their intimate partners in Nyamathi et al.’s (1999) study were African American (59 per cent and 65 per cent, respectively); fewer participants were Mexican/Hispanic (23 per cent of women and 24 per cent of men) and Caucasian (17 per cent of women and 10 per cent of men). Men were more likely to be employed (33 per cent) compared to women (12 per cent) (Nyamathi et al., 1999, p. 493). They found that homeless women scored significantly lower on mental health, self-esteem, drug use and significantly higher on depression, anxiety and childhood and adult sexual abuse, than their intimate partners. These studies provide useful knowledge to the field but tend not to be positioned within the radical tradition of intersectionality (May, 2015).
The connection between intimate partner violence (IPV) and women’s homelessness has also been well documented (Browne and Bassuk, 1997; Zufferey, 2016). Intimate partner violence is the primary reason for women’s homelessness (Chung et al., 2000). Safe and appropriate housing and the economic resources for its maintenance are two of the most pressing concerns for women wanting to escape IPV. Following separation from a violent partner, women and their children are likely to experience significant income loss, financial hardship and housing instability, particularly those who have been at least partially financially dependent on their partners (Pavao et al., 2007; Baker et al., 2009). In the USA, Pavao et al.’s (2007, p. 143) quantitative analysis of the California Women’s Health Survey conducted in 2003 found that women who experienced IPV in the last year are four times more likely to report housing instability than other women, including late rent or mortgage payments, frequent moves and being without their own housing. As well, Baker et al. (2003; 2009; 2010) found that housing problems were worse among women who experienced severe violence, contacted fewer formal systems, had less informational support and had received a negative response from formal welfare services. Women who have been (or are) subjected to IPV encounter multiple systemic barriers to accessing safe and appropriate housing, often placing them and their children at risk of further exposure to IPV (Clough et al., 2014, p. 685). However, when exploring how gender and race intersect, it has been noted that the interaction of individual, familial, social and cultural barriers to help-seeking may differ for women of different cultural backgrounds, such as Latino survivors of IPV (Postmus et al., 2014, p. 464). Intersectionality is used more often in social work research on IPV (rather than homelessness), which points to the feminist origins of IPV theorising.
To analyse gendered inequalities and the effects of IPV on women’s housing, mental health, employment and social participation, my Australian colleagues Suzanne Franzway, Donna Chung, Sarah Wendt, Nicole Moulding and I have recently completed a large Australian study, 1 gathering data from over 600 women in a national online survey (along with 17 in-depth interviews). In this large Australian survey, the majority of the sample reported that their sexual orientation was heterosexual (94.5 per cent), they were not currently experiencing IPV (82.4 per cent), they had children (79 per cent) and they lived in a city or suburban area (65.8 per cent). The majority of respondents were born in Australia (81.2 per cent) and considered their cultural identity to be Australian (78.7 per cent), followed by Northern/Western Europe (12.2 per cent), with small numbers from the Middle East, Asia/South East Asia, South America and Africa. Incomes were in the lower ranges, with 40.6 per cent currently earning under A$30,000 per annum. Unlike previous studies in the US, such as the one by Dewey and Germain (2014, p. 390) in which the highest income level for women accessing transitional housing services was US$25,000 annually, 8.1 per cent of the sample in this community-based study reported an annual income of A$90,000 and over. This level of income exceeds the average male and female salary in Australia (ABS, 2014). Despite these earnings, many women (with their children) had to make frequent and significant geographical moves to escape violence (42 per cent of total survey respondents). The sample of women who responded to the online survey did not have to identify as experiencing homelessness. However, 1.8 per cent of women reported living in ‘impoverished dwellings’ such as cars, streets or parklands. Also, 33 per cent of survey respondents reported staying with family or friends immediately after leaving their partner/s, with only 10 per cent using women’s shelters. We found that IPV exacerbated women’s housing, mental health, employment and community participation barriers, adversely affecting their ability to participate in civil society and act as empowered citizens (see Zufferey et al., 2016 for further details).
Particularly in the USA, race and gender discriminations that increase the risks of persistent homelessness are well documented (Passaro, 2014). As further discussed in Chapter 6, my Australian research has also aimed to make visible the perspectives of racially diverse community groups (including Aboriginal Australians), by exploring differing experiences of home and homelessness (Zufferey and Kerr, 2004; Zufferey and Chung, 2015; Zufferey, 2015). However, American social policy and social work authors Norris et al. (2010), consider how racial inequality can be subsumed under gender in intersectional theorising. For example, they discuss how the feminisation of poverty thesis during the 1990s, which defined the experience of poverty in relation to gender, made invisible ‘the fact that Black women have historically had higher poverty rates than White women’ (Norris et al., 2010, p. 63). Despite researchers in this field espousing social justice commitments, May (2015) also asserts that intersectionality is frequently used in narrow ways that depoliticises the concept of intersections.
Furthermore, it is important for intersectional researchers to examine how oppression and privilege are structurally maintained. For example, historically, white women have been encouraged and expected to stay at home as economically dependent wives and mothers, while black women have been encouraged and expected to engage in ‘breadwinning activities’ (Norris et al., 2010, p. 63). This latter expectation was related to minimum wage laws that did not tend to cover black men and women, and therefore, ‘Black women’s identities could not be constructed solely in relation to their roles as mothers and wives’ (Norris et al., 2010, p. 63). Women from ethnic minority backgrounds, such as African American women or Aboriginal Australian women, continue to be more likely to have children in their care, be poor, experience abuse and violence, be discriminated against in employment and have fewer long-term accommodation options. When intersecting gender and race, Norris et al. (2010, pp. 62–63) note that the concept of ‘racialised gender’ is useful to understand how ‘gender ideologies, practices, and expectations operate differently across racial/ethnic groups’. For example, as discussed later in this chapter, home and homelessness can be variously experienced and interpreted. When theorising home, home can feel like a prison for some women who experience violence in their homes – but home can also be a ‘haven’ from a racist society and a site of resistance to ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ (hooks, 1990).
During the 1970s the ‘cultural turn’ in academic research contributed to deconstructing social processes, emotions, meanings, identities, beliefs and values (Best, 2007). According to Best (2007), by the 1980s there was a burgeoning focus on cultural studies, identity politics and multiculturalism, in relation to changing social, economic, cultural and political institutions. However, research on homelessness has tended to treat interrelated issues such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and geographical location as separate research domains or individual identity categories, without acknowledging their intersections.
Intersectionality is contested. However, it provides for a ‘resistant imaginary’ that acknowledges multifaceted subjectivities, as well as the complex and multiple social structures that contribute to oppressing and privileging social practices (May, 2015). An intersectional framework can broaden social work research and activism in the area of homelessness. This can include challenging social processes and identity categorisations, as well as examining geographical, social and economic developmental contexts (Yuval-Davis, 2006; Nixon and Humphreys, 2010). Furthermore, social work researchers who engage in intersectional research on homelessness can examine mutually reinforcing social processes that both oppress and privilege. At the micro-political level, this can include exploring individual subjectivities and diverse lived experiences of homelessness. At the macro level, this can involve examining structural, political, philosophical and representational complexities of homelessness that contribute to maintaining social inequalities and injustices.
Intersectionality is not widely discussed in social work literature, but it is an ideal tool for examining the complexities between and within different population groups (Murphy et al., 2009). In this book I argue that the individual and/or structural debate in social work literature can be broadened, to incorporate intersectional theorising in social work and homelessness research. Yet, the ‘doing’ of intersectional feminist research is complicated and contested. At a minimum, social work research would include an analysis of two or more categories of identity (or social locations), explaining oppression as well as privilege (Murphy et al., 2009, pp. 52–54; Hulko, 2015). Intersectional research has to be political, intentional and integrated into a theoretical framework that attends to how these differences intersect.
Social work academic Hulko (2015, pp. 77–85) discussed how she operationalised intersectionality in five different social work research projects by: sampling for diversity, asking research participants directly about their social location (for example, ‘Does being a [woman, Afro-Cuban, lesbian] make a difference in any way? How?’), facilitating diverse voices through eliciting diverse responses to visual objects such as photographs, as well as disseminating data in collaboration with community members to influence social change. Next, I discuss my own Australian research projects that have drawn on intersectional theorising.
My own ‘intersectional type’ research
My own research on home and homelessness also aimed to sample for diversity, and consult with different research participants about their meanings of home, using diverse research methods, including reflecting on visual artefacts and feelings of home and homelessness (Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014). Relevant to my studies on home and homelessness is the work of sociologist Yuval-Davis (2011), who theorises intersectionality within the concepts of ‘belonging’ and ‘the politics of belonging’. Belonging involves emotional attachment to ‘home/s’, whilst the politics of belonging relates to the power involved in constructing social boundaries that include and exclude particular categories of people (Yuval-Davis, 2011, pp. 10–18), such as the housed and the homeless. Belonging is about feeling ‘at home’ and hoping for a ‘safe’ place to call home (Ignatieff, 2001). Feelings of disconnection from a sense of ‘home’ and safety are common for the majority of people who experience homelessness. Homelessness can include migrants and refugees ‘feeling at home’ (or not) in a new country, as well as feelings of safety (or not) in the ‘family home’ (Zufferey, 2015). The politics of belonging relate to specific political projects that aim to construct belonging to particular collectivity/ies, in very specific ways, with specific boundaries (Yuval-Davis, 2011, pp. 4–5). This can include researching people’s emotions about belonging to particular social collectives, related to, for example, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexuality, class, ability, age, mobility, wealth, religion, geographical location, nation state and a country’s social and economic developmental contexts (Yuval-Davis, 2006; Nixon and Humphreys, 2010). An intersectional framework around the notion of belonging and the politics of belonging (Yuval Davis, 2011) can broaden the social work political project in the area of home and homelessness.
In three of my recent studies I have used an intersectional approach to examine diverse notions of home and homelessness. The first project gathered the perspectives of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal service providers about how they conceptualised and responded to homelessness in a remote geographical location (Zufferey and Chung, 2015). In the second project I took a ‘majority inclusive’ approach to explore understandings of home more broadly across different ages, class backgrounds, migration and refugee experiences (Zufferey, 2015). The third project involved exploring home, gender and sexuality in more depth, using visual artefacts or objects as a prompt for discussing experiences of home and homelessness (Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014).
For the first project, Professor Donna Chung (who is currently working at Curtin University, in Western Australia) and I travelled over 2,000 kms (return) from Perth to two remote mining towns in Western Australia, with the then CEO of a domestic violence service in one of these towns. The aim of this research was to explore how homelessness is defined and responded to in remote geographical locations, in towns with high population numbers of Indigenous Australians. We gathered the perspectives of eight service providers through focus groups (Zufferey and Chung, 2015). Seven of the eight service providers were female and one was male. Service providers were employed in domestic violence services, local government, employment, drug and alcohol, community development and health services. The majority of the service providers had moved to the towns to work. Two participants were of Aboriginal/Indigenous background and could speak from an ‘insiders’ perspective about issues for Aboriginal people and communities in this Western Australian location. One non-Aboriginal service provider identified as being ‘from’ the local ‘Goldfields’ area. The remaining five service providers were from other parts of Australia and other countries. The conversations in the focus groups related to dilemmas in service delivery, funding arrangements, policy definitions and practice responses, when working with Aboriginal families and communities in remote locations. The key findings of this research were that normative policy definitions of homelessness that focused on ‘living in a house’ as a ‘home’ were not always culturally relevant for local Aboriginal communities. As well, there was limited access to adequate housing options in both communities. Furthermore, ‘top down’ funding and decisions often occurred without community consultation, fragmenting service delivery, limiting ‘grassroots’ participation and constraining opportunities for locally relevant service responses (Zufferey and Chung, 2015, p. 13). Consistent with McCall’s (2005) anti-categorical research approach, these findings highlight Westernised and urban assumptions that underpin the policy domain in which housing and homelessness responses are determined, emphasising the limits of current policy conceptualisations and interventions, by making visible the perspectives of service providers working in remote areas.
The second research project undertaken with Dr Tammy Hand used an intersectional approach to examine ‘majority inclusive’ and diverse notions of home and homelessness in Adelaide, South Australia (Zufferey, 2015). We commenced the research with the assumption that conceptualisations of home and homelessness are relative and complex, influenced by changing gender and power relations and historical, discursive, political and cultural contexts. As Christensen and Jensen (2012, p. 120) argue, life story narratives involve ‘taking everyday life as point of departure’ and analysing unmarked (invisible) social categories that show differences between and within social groups, thereby highlighting intersecting social categorisations and processes. This study used life story narrative analysis to examine ‘the complex process of identification and positioning’ and ‘discursive construction of meaning’ (Christensen and Jensen, 2012, p. 114), by focusing on meanings and material experiences of home and homelessness. We gathered the narratives of three men and ten women of different migration experiences, ethnicities, classes, genders and ages through individual narrative interviews. This research shows how notions of home and homelessness intersect with the influences of class, migration and refugee experiences (Zufferey, 2015). The findings highlighted diverse perspectives on and identifications with home/s (and homelessness) in Australia, relating to the experiences of refugee displacement and migration experiences, as well as to a sense of belonging through class aspirations. More details about the findings of this research are discussed in Chapter 6.
In the third research project with my colleague Dr Margaret Rowntree, we examined the intersections between gender and sexuality, in regard to home and homelessness (Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014). This project was conceptualised after I had previously examined race, gender and class relations, but neglected to sample for sexuality. My colleague whose area of research interest is sexuality questioned my research frame and asked: ‘where is sexuality on your axes of difference?’ As Rowntree (2014) notes, sexuality is frequently neglected in social work education, research, policy and practice. Certainly, a disproportionate number of young people who experience homelessness identify as being lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and are more likely to be discriminated against, bullied and verbally or physically harassed at school and in their family (Cochran et al., 2002; Christiani et al., 2008; Corliss et al., 2011). Consequently, we joined forces to undertake a research project, focusing particularly on gender, sexuality and home/homelessness. We explored how sexuality and notions of home and homelessness are embodied and imagined by asking men and women to reflect on objects or visual artefacts of their choice in individual interviews and focus groups (Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014). Following the works of Kuhn (2007) and Pink (2007) on visual methodologies, we asked research participants to bring along an artefact that represented home or homelessness to them. Visual and auditory objects can ‘place’ a person within the space and the emotional connections that embed them within ‘home’ (Gibson, 2004), evoking deeply embodied narratives.
We have published the findings from three face-to-face interviews and a focus group of six women (all over 50 years old) who identified as lesbian (Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014). For this small group of lesbian women, ‘home’ involved the embodiment (and imagining) of physical spaces and locality (including houses and landscapes) and the identification with communities of shared interest, particularly lesbian communities but also environmental movements. Two men participated in this research but their narratives differed and tended to focus on objects and practices in their house as ‘home’ and experiences of abuse in their childhood. The two men did not express a sense of belonging to a community or collective as ‘home’ on the basis of their sexuality. The findings of this study resonated with Pilkey’s (2013) work, in which he found that sexual identity is often closeted in the parental home and as adults, ‘new homes’ provide opportunities for freer sexual expression. Sexuality is mutually articulated with practices associated with ethnicity, migration, poverty, class, religion and nations, in ways that individuals negotiate and remember home places and spaces (Fortier, 2003).
Similar to Hulko’s (2015, p. 80) intersectional social work research that used visual methods such as photography to elicit the perspectives of lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, we also found that visual objects were useful to elicit participant’s varied recollections. This included multiple lived experiences, meaning constructions and subjective positionings, in relation to imagined and embodied relationships with ‘home’ (and homelessness). The use of visual artefacts in our research prompted women’s and men’s recollections of deeply held emotional experiences of home, which varied widely. For example, one woman who experienced homelessness explained how she had constructed living spaces from wooden boxes, in a van in which she lived. These artefacts connected emotionally to individual experiences, histories and identities. This study challenged heteronormative assumptions that influence how home and homelessness are understood by giving ‘voice’ to more diverse understandings, including a collective sense of belonging to a community based on sexual identification (see Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014 for further details).
My three research projects have highlighted how intersecting social and geographical locations can be explored differently in social work research on home and homelessness. This research has illustrated that an intersectional social work approach to researching homelessness is able to: focus on remote geographical locations to deconstruct urbanised policy constructions of homelessness (akin to anti-categorical research), interview a ‘majority inclusive’ sample using narrative interviewing techniques about diverse and subjective perceptions of home, and make visible the perspectives of a specific minority population group who identify as lesbian or gay, using creative research methodologies. I also discuss another project on sexuality and age in Chapter 6 (Rowntree and Zufferey, 2015).
There are potentially numerous dilemmas experienced by social workers who plan to engage in intersectional homelessness research, including: which intersecting social categories are privileged, what to focus on in multilayered social work responses to homelessness, how to think simultaneously about structures, dynamics and subjectivities, including the different effects of representations of homelessness, how to design an intersectional research project and to analyse intersectional data.
A dilemma in designing intersectional research is deciding what actual social categories are going to be given attention and why. In retrospect, in my own research, I have tended to focus on commonly examined categories such as, responses to homelessness in rural, remote and urban locations (Zufferey and Chung, 2015; Zufferey, 2015), power, gender and class locations of social work and social workers (Zufferey, 2009), as well as age, class, gender, culture, migration, sexuality and meanings of home (Rowntree and Zufferey, 2014; Zufferey, 2015). Therefore, my research attention has rendered invisible other neglected social categories, such as religion, disability and the geography of places and spaces (McDowell, 1999).
When designing intersectional research, it is important to continually ask ourselves how social workers contribute to privileging and oppressing social processes, making invisible inequalities and constituting who remains marginalised. Research in social work has tended to treat marginalised groups as ‘the others’, to homogenise their experiences and make invisible in-group complexities ‘under the guise of generalisability’ (Murphy et al., 2009, p. 36). A further dilemma in intersectional research is that participants may not wish to explicitly define their own ‘axes of intersectionality’, raising questions about who defines who as oppressed and privileged, and the processes of self-identification (Murphy et al., 2009, p. 55).
As well, whilst I frequently use the terms ‘diverse’ and ‘complex’, Gressgård (2008, p. 1) observes that key concepts used in intersectional research such as ‘complexity’ and ‘multiplicity’ can actually obscure more than they reveal. It is important for social workers to ask how intersectional analyses can examine intersecting power relations that are mutually constitutive, which includes focusing on identities, dynamics and social processes that constitute social inequalities, without reducing everything to being simply ‘multiple’ and ‘complex’.
A key concept in intersectional social work research is that differences are socially categorised around socially constructed norms and embedded in unequal power relations (Murphy et al., 2009, p. 52). An intersectional analysis is useful for examining how social processes, identity categories/subjectivities and unequal power relations interplay to constitute social work responses to homelessness. Depending on disciplinary and theoretical influences, intersectionality has developed in multiple ways. The classic race/gender/class intersections can be broadened in intersectional research, to include an unlimited range of categories, such as sexuality, disability, religion, age, physical location and diverse other social divisions, including the intersection of gender/sex (Lykke, 2010a; 2010b). Social work researchers using intersectional approaches negotiate this complex terrain to find ways of researching social issues that suit their personal and professional values and the aims of the study they wish to pursue.
In this chapter, I have examined social work literature on homelessness and intersectionality. I have discussed homelessness literature in the USA, UK and Europe, gender and race relations and included my own Australian intersectional research projects. The next chapter explores intersectionality in policy making and analysis, by examining definitions of homelessness in policy and legislation and Housing First initiatives.
Note
1‘Gendered Violence and Citizenship: the complex effects of intimate partner violence on mental health, housing and employment’, which is funded by Australian Research Council Project No: DP1130104437.
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