Dr Pamela Irwin & Dr George W. Leeson to present:
"Late middle-aged, single women and the risk of homelessness in rural Australia."
In 2011, one in 200 people in Australia were homeless, either precariously housed, or living in severely overcrowded or improvised accommodation, sleeping rough, or staying in homeless hostels, boarding houses, and/or with relatives or friends on a temporary basis. Approximately one seventh of this population was aged 55 years or older, and in concert with the ageing population demographic, this number is projected to increase.
Although the public face of homelessness in adults is typically associated with men, the number of single, late middle-aged women experiencing homelessness is growing. Recent research in Australia augments this scenario (Sharam, 2015). Even though most women successfully manage their life circumstances until their fifth or sixth decades, sudden adverse situations such as living alone, health and/or employment related crises, or age discrimination may result in unemployment (Morris, 2013). The shock of losing work, exacerbated by the lack and/or low superannuation contributions of late middle-aged women puts these women at housing risk (McFerran, 2010). Here, systemic factors such as lack of affordable housing, personal circumstances including social disaffiliation, and/or their convergence (Fitzpatrick, Johnsen & White, 2011), are exacerbated for women in rural and remote regions of Australia. These perceptions accord with the conception of homelessness as a social construct, with individual or structural interpretations of social problems assumed to drive homelessness in a temporal linear relationship.
Stimulated by research on homelessness in older people by Leeson (2006, 2011), an ethnographic study of late middle-aged, women living on their own in rural Australia was conducted in 2012. Here, the reality of these women’s lives revealed a complex multiplicity (Valentine, 2016), where individual and societal related factors intersect to contribute to homelessness vulnerability in this group.
The findings from this research (Irwin, 2015) are to be presented at the 2016 GSA (Gerontological Society of America) Annual Scientific Meeting to be held in November in New Orleans.
