This presentation examines how housing instability creates critical barriers to safety for refugee women experiencing domestic and family violence, particularly where disability, financial dependence, trauma, and settlement pressures intersect.
Drawing from frontline counselling practice with refugee and asylum seeker women in Australia through STARTTS, this presentation highlights how women with complex needs are often forced to make impossible decisions between unsafe homes, homelessness, family separation, and uncertain settlement outcomes. For many, limited English, insecure income, visa dependency, lack of culturally responsive housing pathways, and caregiving responsibilities for children with disabilities significantly reduce options for escape and recovery.
The presentation explores how domestic violence cannot be addressed effectively without stable and accessible housing pathways. It will examine the mental health consequences of prolonged housing insecurity, including chronic stress, trauma reactivation, fear, and social isolation, and show how fragmented systems can unintentionally deepen entrapment.
Using practice-based reflections, this session identifies structural gaps in housing and domestic violence responses for refugee women and proposes trauma-informed, culturally responsive approaches that strengthen safety planning, coordinated case responses, and long-term recovery.
By centring refugee women lived realities, this presentation calls for integrated systems that treat housing not as secondary support, but as a core domestic violence safety intervention.