in brief
- Experts are warning that the cost of living crisis is trapping women in unsafe living situations.
- Housing data shows that Australian renters have hit affordability limits across the country.
This article contains references to domestic and family violence.
Experts are warning that women leaving violent relationships are increasingly being pushed into an impossible choice between safety and financial survival due to the cost of living crisis gripping Australia.
Victorian women's crisis support charity Juno has called on the government for greater and better-managed funding for services that can help women before they reach crisis point.
Roughly two-thirds of women who experience domestic and family abuse end up leaving their homes, often abandoning housing security, savings, and financial stability, charity data shows.
One woman, Mary*, said that the support she received from Juno while accessing one of its programs when she was homeless, pregnant, and caring for a toddler, was a "godsend".
Emphasising that issues of homelessness and precarity are often sudden and far closer than people realise, Mary said her "middle-class" life had "the rug literally pulled out" after she was physically assaulted by her partner.
"Going from one day being a family, having a place to stay and enjoying life, to being a single mum in a DV situation, and your partner's gone to jail … you've got nowhere to go and nowhere to live," she said.
"Within two or three days, the whole dynamic of my life changed."
Rent rises exacerbate the situation
Mary said that she found herself in desperate need of housing but was blocked at every turn.
She says she wasn't prioritised by support programs because she did not face other issues like addiction and was able to scrape enough money together to keep her child fed, and was forced to compete in the tough Melbourne rental market.
Experts have long warned that there is a clear relationship between financial pressures and domestic violence. As economic difficulties increase, family and domestic violence becomes more frequent and more severe.
Domestic Violence NSW, the state's peak body, has reported that 95 per cent of its members saw a link between financial pressure and domestic violence.
92 per cent also said that there had been an increase in the complexity of DV cases as a direct result of the cost of living crisis.
Those figures, from 2023, were collected when rental vacancy rates were around 1.2 per cent. Today, vacancy rates have declined nationally to just 0.7 per cent, according to recent data from Domain.
"The amount tenants can pay can no longer be stretched," Alice Stolz, national property editor at Domain, told SBS News.
Compromises like looking further beyond their target suburbs or renting sub-optimal accommodation have been exhausted, she noted, meaning Australian renters are "at a point where there's nowhere else to go".
Mary said that her two and a half years accessing a crisis support program brought her into contact with other women also fleeing difficult situations, many of whom she said stay trapped because of the financial difficulty in starting over.
"The fact is, everyone's on [Facebook] Marketplace getting furniture. Everyone's credit cards are maxed out, everyone's AfterPays are maxed out," she said.
"It's insane. It's just not okay."
Rent freeze
On Thursday, the Greens called for a rent freeze to address a cost of living crisis that has been exacerbated by the war in the Middle East and the resulting disruption to global trade.
"Renters have no buffer. Indeed, renters are the buffer for landlords and property investors. They have nothing to protect them when prices spike and they are in deep crisis," Greens senator Barbara Pocock told reporters.
"We have many renters who are one rent increase away from eviction and being tipped into homelessness, and we have a massive spike in homelessness around our country."
Pocock argued that rent freezes and an end to evictions — tactics used during the COVID-19 pandemic — would help renters from becoming homeless as the crisis drives up the cost of food, fuel, and other essentials.
Some experts have estimated that food prices could rise by as much as 20 per cent, due to the blockading of the Strait of Hormuz by both Iran and the United States. However, the true impact of the crisis will depend on how long it continues before either side reaches an agreement.
A point of difference
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data from 2024-2025 showed 174,000 women accessed specialist homelessness services each year. Around 40 per cent of clients accessing specialist homelessness services had experienced family and domestic violence.
Juno CEO Tanya Corrie told SBS News that its flagship EMPower program helps women build "financial buffers and savings" so that "if something happens", they have the resources to manage it without ending up on the street.
The program is a "participant-led" service, connecting those escaping difficult situations with work and other opportunities to increase their overall stability.
Mary says the service treated her "as a whole person" after facing some difficulty engaging other services.
"The way they just listened to me, the specific questions that they asked, like, 'How are you doing?' 'What was life before this like?' and 'What do you miss about it? How do we get some of that back?'"
Escaping the crisis cycle
While the service has relied on philanthropic donations to keep it running, Corrie argues that more sustainable funding for Juno and other services in the support space would enable organisations to move away from a "crisis focus" and toward a longer-term, more sustainable one.
"We are funded primarily through government to respond to the crisis, but we do very little early on, and we do very little afterwards," she said.
"That means we're constantly seeing people cycle in and out of homelessness and family violence, because we wait till it gets really bad before we'll help them.
"We need to stop looking at it as an either/or proposition and understand that a whole package of things are necessary to combat this."
While she argues that the current cost of living crisis has made the situation on the ground "more challenging", it "just means we get more creative."
Now a mother of a six-year-old and an eight-year-old who get to enjoy the warm weather on the Gold Coast together, Mary is a homeowner and looking to buy an apartment in Queensland, too.
"I don't know how it's gone from that to that. I still think it's insane," she said.
She expressed gratitude to Juno and its program, and to Tessa, a staff member who supported her.
"The first few meetings, all she did was listen to me — and no-one listened to me before that."
*Not her real name.
If you or someone you know is impacted by family and domestic violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, text 0458 737 732, or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.
The Men’s Referral Service, operated by No to Violence, can be contacted on 1300 766 491.
Support for people experiencing homelessness can be found at homelessnessaustralia.org.au
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