New European network website launched
Posted on 27 March 2014
Women's Homelessness in Europe Network (WHEN) has just launched a new website www.womenshomelessness.org
Co-directed by Paula Mayock at Trinity College, Dublin and Joanne Bretherton at the Centre for Housing Policy, WHEN (Women's Homelessness in Europe Network) is the first pan European academic network focused on women's experience of homelessness and housing exclusion. Long seen as a 'male' social problem, the nature of homelessness has changed over the course of the last 30 years, with more women experiencing youth homelessness, homelessness as lone adults and also living rough.
There is also growing evidence that research and policy focused on homeless people sleeping rough and using emergency accommodation has effectively gendered the perception of homelessness by inadvertently focusing on situations and contexts in which the people experiencing homelessness are disproportionately male. When hidden homeless populations and family/lone parent homelessness are examined, the extent to which women experience both shorter-term homelessness and forms of recurrent and sustained homelessness associated with high support needs begins to become apparent. The close associations between women's experience of gender based/domestic violence and homelessness, while recognised and documented, also tend to have been relatively neglected in an evidence base that has become distorted through a misdirected focus on forms of homelessness that are predominantly male.
WHEN seeks to redress this balance by working to re-conceptualise homelessness by exploring how gender may be associated with differentiated homelessness pathways, to build up a robust evidence base on women's experience of homelessness and to influence practice and policy to both recognise and respond more effectively to the needs of women who are experiencing homelessness and housing exclusion. WHEN involves senior academics and leading homelessness researchers from across Europe, with representatives from Belgium, England, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Slovenia and Sweden.
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For more about WHEN see http://www.womenshomelessness.org/ and contact mail@womenshomelessness.org