’Invisible’ homeless women are not accessing the services they need

Homeless women are not accessing the support of social services that they need to progress due to a lack of service coordination and the complex needs of the service users, a recent project has found. Researchers at the University of Bristol found that homeless women 'are used to making themselves invisible in order to survive' and are therefore a hard-to-reach group for social services to work with. As part of the TARA project, a longitudinal study of the service use and need of homeless women , funded by the School for Social Care Research (part of the National Institute for Health Research), the research team ed a group of homeless women aged 19 to 59 over 18 months and 15 practitioners from a range of services. Homeless women may well experience being 'homeless' differently from men, partly because women may not sleep rough but end up in precarious, and often dangerous places, and also because the notion of 'home' has different gendered connotations for men and women. None of the participants referred to having a social worker for themselves as adults, but instead mentioned others such as mental health teams, housing support workers and third sector support workers are fulfilling functions that social workers would have provided in the past. This in turn means that women have to re-tell their life story to a large number of practitioners, over and over again, in order to access services, which can be humiliating and disempowering. It can also contribute to the impact of complex trauma, pertinent because participants were struggling to survive the impact of a large number of traumatic life events.