Safe at Home Needs to be Affordable at Home – Women’s Agenda

22 October 2015 by Hannah Gissane and Alison McDonald

When women won the right to own property it was not envisaged that this would be conditional on safety. Domestic violence is one of the leading drivers of homelessness in Australia. Today, too many women are forced to surrender their right to housing and are displaced in order to be safe from violence. As Rosie Batty put it so well: “What we’re talking about is giving women a choice because it’s quite ludicrous to think we have always placed the onus of safety on to the victim, expected that they uproot themselves, move, pull their children out of school, leave the communities and family members that are supporting them, live anonymously and hide.”...