In the universe of “things we’d like to know” about women veterans and how they experience periods of unstable housing and homelessness, one of the things we want to know more about is the often-opaque relationship between Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), formerly known as Domestic Violence (DV), and homelessness. There are far more questions than answers, and to date very little research has explored this relationship.
In 2015, when I first started surveying women veterans across the country about their experiences of homelessness after military service, a surprising number of women veterans reported “staying in an unsafe relationship,” such as one characterized by intimate partner violence, during periods of housing instability. The first survey had 400 respondents, but the second one, begun two years later, has many more respondents — over 2,500 to date — and yet this choice continues to be the second most prevalent accommodation chosen, by a new set of women veteran respondents, from the same array of more than a dozen choices. In fact, it’s so prevalent only couch-surfing is mentioned more often; sleeping in vehicles comes in a distant third. So clearly, there’s an important relationship of some kind between IPV and homelessness in women veterans — but just what is that relationship, and how much do we know about it?