By the Council to Homeless Persons

Family violence is the single biggest driver of homelessness for women, young people and children in Victoria. In 2022–23, across the state, 54% of all women, young people and children who visited a Specialist Homelessness Service reported that they were also experiencing family violence. For nearly 4 in 10 women, young people and children visiting the homelessness sector, family violence was the primary driver of homelessness.

This report establishes an evidence base regarding the extent to which people experiencing homelessness and family violence are moving between these two sectors, explores existing guidelines and frameworks that affect the way the sectors intersect, provides an in-depth consultation report and offers recommendations for change to enable improved outcomes for clients experiencing homelessness and family violence.

It seeks to understand:

1. The extent to which victim survivors of family violence seeking crisis accommodation are being referred between the homelessness and family violence sectors and back, without receiving the service they are requesting.

2. The barriers faced by victim survivors in accessing crisis accommodation, which leads to multiple referrals.

3. Examples of good practice that can be built on to better support victim survivors of family violence seeking crisis accommodation.

The report makes a series of recommendations to better respond to family violence and homelessness, including:

• Build 7,990 new and additional social homes every year for 10 years.

• Additional investment in Safe at Home-type programs to prevent women, young people, and children from entering into homelessness.

• Prevent homelessness by enabling renters to stay in their homes.

• nvest in perpetrator interventions to reduce the impact of men’s family violence.

• Invest in systems where Lived Experience leads.

Melbourne: Council to Homeless Persons 2025, 121p.

Edited by Bonnie S. Fisher

Since the 1970s, researchers and practitioners from a wide spectrum of disciplines have documented that violence against women and family violence are substantial problems in the United States (see Crowell and Burgess, 1996). Because of their persistent efforts, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 (Title IV of Public Law 103–322, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994), and the Violence Against Women Office, now called the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW), was established in the U.S. Department of Justice. These Federal acts marked violence against women and family violence as national problems in need of both interdisciplinary scientific inquiry and development of community-based prevention and intervention policies and practices.

2004, 356p.