ABSTRACT
Women’s organisations in Britain, in a second wave of feminism with roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have fought for over twenty years for a national funding base for refuges, for effective rehousing policies, economic and social support for women forced to leave their
homes, legislative protection, and effective law enforcement. None of these battles has yet been fully won. It has always been an uphill struggle to get women’s danger and distress taken seriously. In particular, Government has lacked or resisted a comprehensive understanding of the problem that could underpin action across a range of fronts. The Children Act of 1989 (implemented in 1991) makes no mention of domestic violence, for example, yet contact orders made under the Act (see Chapter 7, this volume) can involve men being given details of their ex-partners’ whereabouts. Furthermore, the lack of comprehensive national planning means that gains for women in one area are frequently accompanied by losses in another. Recent research by Malos and Hague (1993), for instance, indicates that proposed improvements in legislation on homelessness have been accompanied by cutbacks in funding for local government housing departments that make rehousing harder than ever. There is also an interplay (or perhaps a vacuum) between agency responses that is counterproductive for women. Many housing departments now expect women to obtain injunctions through the courts, for example (ibid., pp.36-7).
