Safe housing for Black and minoritised migrant women
Elizabeth Jiménez-Yáñez, head of policy and public affairs at Hibiscus, explains how their Toolkit helps Black and minoritised migrant women overcome barriers to accessing secure and suitable housing.
“You cannot heal when you’re always scared of where you are living” — Hibiscus service user
Access to safe, secure and suitable housing is a legal entitlement and a foundation for wellbeing and dignity. Yet, as any housing sector professional will know, many Black and minoritised migrant women face overwhelming barriers to accessing this basic right.
Hibiscus has met this challenge by creating the Safe housing for Black and minoritised migrant women: Toolkit for implementing intersectional, gender-informed, rights-based frontline practice and accompanying Evidence and Policy Briefing.
The toolkit has been developed through co-production with frontline practitioners and Black and minoritised migrant women with experience of homelessness and unsafe housing. Building on Hibiscus’ Unsafe, Insecure: Evidence Report, we have identified key elements of frontline practice that can help overcome the barriers preventing Black and minoritised migrant women accessing safe and suitable housing.
Hibiscus is a feminist, anti-racist and intersectional women’s organisation that has delivered advocacy and advice services to Black and minoritised migrant women in contact with the criminal justice and immigration systems for nearly 40 years. We have never experienced such a challenging time for the women we support — and for ourselves as a service provider.
We offer frontline support from a trauma-informed, rights-based, woman-centred perspective. Most of our service users are victim-survivors of multiple and overlapping forms of violence against women and girls (VAWG), including trafficking and modern slavery. For the women we support, safe housing is essential for recovery.
The Illegal Migration Act and Nationality and Borders Act imposed restrictions on migrant people which directly affect our service users. The situation is now worsening due to the government’s introduction of sweeping changes to the asylum system and ‘earned settlement’ proposals. This includes the introduction in March of temporary refugee status, without parliamentary debate.
These measures will dramatically worsen precarity for Black and minoritised migrant women and increase existing barriers to safe housing and recovery from trauma. Meanwhile, the economic outlook remains poor, and the housing crisis is not receding.
Demand on frontline services is only going to grow. It is therefore more important than ever that frontline practitioners, commissioners and senior decision-makers are equipped to respond as effectively as possible when housing needs arise.
The toolkit
This is where the Toolkit comes in. While many barriers to safe housing appear beyond the control of those working on the ground, there is much that frontline professionals — and commissioners of frontline services — can do.
It is more important than ever for:
- Voluntary sector women’s specialist services to be able to work sustainably to provide that support, with adequate funding
- Statutory frontline professionals, including the police and healthcare providers, to know where to refer women for support
- Local authority housing practitioners to have a clear understanding of their powers and duties
- Frontline agencies to work collaboratively to build a shared understanding of the realities on the ground, and to mitigate harms wherever possible.
The Toolkit is intended to support this essential work, to strengthen frontline services and thereby to improve housing outcomes, relying on seven core principles which are set out in detail in the resource.
These are:
- Proactive responsibility
- Gendered, trauma-informed and intersectional practice
- Culturally responsive communication within an anti-racist framework
- Trust and continuity
- Legal literacy
- Collaborative, cross-sector working
- Staff wellbeing and reflective practice.
I hope the Toolkit will help you to do what is in your power to help Black and minoritised migrant women, and their children, to access their basic right to decent and safe housing.
Get in touch with Elizabeth at elizabeth@hibiscus.org.uk
