How the housing crisis traps women in abuse: ‘Nowhere to go, nowhere to heal’
Home should be the place where we feel safest – a space of comfort, security, and peace – but for thousands of women each year, domestic abuse makes it the opposite.
As we mark World Mental Health Day, it’s vital that we recognise the inextricable link between violence against women and girls (VAWG), housing, and mental wellbeing. At Refuge, we know firsthand that access to safe accommodation is vital to empowering survivors to leave their perpetrator and rebuild their lives free from abuse – yet for many women, this is simply out of reach.
With the housing crisis in full swing, social housing stock depleted and local authorities struggling to make ends meet, it is harder than ever for survivors of domestic abuse to find safe accommodation.
In 2022, a Women’s Aid survey of survivors found that three-quarters of women living with and having financial ties to an abuser said the cost-of-living crisis had prevented them from leaving or made it harder to do so. Two years on, it’s clear that the housing crisis is creating similar pressures – in some cases forcing survivors to decide between living with an abuser or having no home. This is a devastating choice that absolutely no one should have to make.
While survivors can receive housing support from local authorities, inadequate statutory systems, gaps between policy and practice, a shortage of truly affordable social homes and underfunding for specialist refuge services mean that many women still face the very real prospect of destitution.
Although the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 amended housing legislation to designate survivors of abuse in the ‘priority need’ category for homelessness applications, survivors are still facing gatekeeping from local authorities. From excessive delays on application decisions and failures to provide emergency accommodation, to unsuitable offers of temporary accommodation – survivors are being failed over and over again.
In the absence of housing solutions through local authority provision, survivors are often expected to rent privately, but soaring rental costs are just another hurdle to leaving an abuser – particularly if a survivor has nowhere else to turn and cannot stay with friends or family.
As a result, each year thousands of survivors find themselves homeless because they need to leave an abusive partner. In 2023, a report by homelessness charity St Mungo’s found that almost half of their female clients had experienced domestic abuse. More recently, Stonewall reported that 42% of referrals to their housing service between 2024 and 2025 were linked to domestic abuse. Despite this, the hidden intersection of domestic abuse and homelessness has long been overlooked.
At Refuge, the trauma caused by housing insecurity is something that we see day in and day out. Every two minutes, someone contacts the Refuge-run National Domestic Abuse Helpline for support, and often we hear from women who have just fled abuse. In many cases, they have left with nothing, may be injured, and are in urgent need of accommodation. While helpline staff are equipped to empower survivors by suggesting options for next steps, time and time again we hear about enormous barriers to securing safe housing.
With no other options available, several survivors have reported being forced to sleep in cars with their children – in one instance, due to a disagreement between housing and social services over who was responsible for securing accommodation. More recently, some local authorities have even offered survivors tents as so-called “safe” housing. This is exacerbated by a lack of frontline understanding of domestic abuse. When survivors first turn to their local authority for support, they frequently struggle to secure urgent appointments and may encounter staff who do not understand how coercive control can impact a woman’s ability to advocate for herself.
Other barriers include demands for evidence of abuse or ID documentation – items many survivors simply do not have, as they often leave the homes they share with their abusers with nothing. Women with no recourse to public funds, such as some migrant survivors, are at particularly high risk of exploitation and face destitution – with even fewer avenues for support than most. Without access to welfare benefits or public housing, many are left completely without safety nets.
Polling by Shelter last year found that housing pressures can take a huge mental toll. More than half of adults (56%) reported being kept awake at night over the previous year because of housing pressures, while seven in 10 (70%) said they felt anxious, and half said their housing situation had left them feeling hopeless (49%). These stresses are exacerbated for survivors of abuse, who are already up to three times more likely to develop mental illness.
We urgently need local authorities to be provided with the resources and training they need to ensure all survivors can access their housing rights, in addition to stronger mechanisms for holding local authorities to account when these rights are not upheld. We need much closer collaboration between housing, social services and children’s services – which currently work in silos – we need more social housing, and we need the unique needs of survivors to be taken seriously.
More than anything, we must address the chronic underfunding faced by Refuge, the UK’s largest specialist domestic abuse organisation, and other services in the sector. It is essential that we take a holistic approach to tackling VAWG and fight for a future in which every survivor is empowered to flee abuse in the knowledge they can access somewhere safe to call home.
