Last week’s controversy around the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre put the spotlight on the need for single-sex services to protect vulnerable women, but it’s very far from the only example of how Scottish women are being let down in this regard by both the Scottish Government and civic organisations.
The homelessness system in Scotland has collapsed. Emergency accommodation is dangerous, sub-standard, and overcrowded. There has been an epidemic of deaths in hotels and B&Bs in recent years.
Shockingly, 67 women in Scotland have died in homeless accommodation over the three-year period up to 2022, the most recent figures available, and the situation is steadily getting worse.
In Glasgow alone, there are 242 women currently staying in hotels/B&Bs, as well as 70 families with children staying in such places.
There is a clear lack of safeguarding in emergency temporary accommodation in general, but very little attention has been paid to the specific challenges faced by women who are stuck in the homeless system. Women are particularly at risk in mixed-sex emergency accommodation, and the hotels are notorious: multiple rapes and sexual assaults have been reported in recent months
One woman reported:
“In the first hotel I was put in, a man posed as a member of staff, so I let him in. He said he had teabags and sugar for me, and could he check my toilet was working. I let him in. He raped me and left.”
Women often have specific needs that are not addressed by the current homeless system. They are very vulnerable to being targeted by predatory men.
Glasgow Tactical Feminists have joined the campaign to demand the provision of women-only homeless accommodation:
“Becoming homeless in Scotland can have deadly consequences for women. Not only is it damaging to women’s physical and mental health, but the risk of death has increased exponentially since Covid. As local authorities fail to cope, women, including those with children, are being failed by a system frequently unable to provide even emergency accommodation.
For women who are offered Council resources, the standard of accommodation is not only beyond dire, it is often fundamentally unsafe. Women experiencing homelessness are at significantly higher risk of violence and exploitation, often from the men who are accommodated alongside them.
Similar to the threats, sexual assaults, and harassment homeless women are subject to from male members of the public, women consistently report experiences of abuse, victimisation, and violence from the men they are forced to share accommodation with.
Women’s lives are being put at risk through the absence of single-sex homeless accommodation. Safe housing and emergency resources are desperately needed now. Both adequate leadership and additional funding are essential to stop more women dying.”
Women have started to speak out about the situation in the hostels. Sinead Watson, a 33-year-old who spent forty weeks in homeless accommodation after struggling with issues related to gender detransition, described her experience:
“Over the past months, I’ve stayed in three separate hostels. I have been threatened, assaulted, and robbed. I’ve had no sense of security or safety.
“There was literally no security keeping men away from women. Pimps hang around outside the front door at night and grab you while you leave or enter the building. The men prayed on the women like we were meat. I saw a young junkie giving head to a fat old man on my second day there, up the stairs. She was crying.
Alcoholics and junkies are bribed into sex. I saw it in all three hostels I stayed in. We need more women-only shelters. The women in these hostels are free game. It’s disgusting.
You could be my worst enemy and I’d still take you in to avoid that.”
From the testimony of those who have experienced it, it is clear that women are at constant risk in hotel and B&B accommodation and feel unsafe.
The STO agrees that the last thing Glasgow needs is to see yet more homeless services or accommodation shut down. In order to fix our collapsed homelessness services, however, the council must admit to the scale of the problem and recognise that the current system is not a success.
The record number of rough sleepers in Glasgow doesn’t reflect a change in lifestyle choices, but rather is an indictment of our lack of social housing and the difficulty of accessing services. Last December, Homeless Project Scotland took in a woman with a newborn baby because she’d been refused accommodation by the council.
The lack of emergency accommodation is not a new problem. Glasgow City Council has been failing to meet its statutory obligation to house people for years and has been the subject of several investigations by the Scottish Government which have failed to resolve the problem, and both Glasgow and Edinburgh have registered housing emergencies.
The Scottish Government has passed headline-grabbing “progressive” legislation around the problem, which has failed to translate into results. But the blame doesn’t solely lie with councils either: housing groups have warned for years that the shortage of social housing is the core issue.
The Scottish Government’s response to the housing crisis has been inadequate, and the blame cannot all be put on UK legislation. It was the Scottish Government that decided to cut the housing budget by a swingeing 24% in this year’s budget.
(Wings readers can contrast such decisions for themselves with the limitless funding that still appears to be available for certain more fashionable causes.)
The £200 million cut was made, reportedly, to appease the Scottish Greens, who have supported the mass demolition of social housing, in contradiction to their own policies and COP26 promises to retrofit buildings. The Housing (Scotland) Bill 2024 has been criticised by organisations such as Shelter because it does nothing to address the collapsed homelessness services and shortage of social housing.
Despite repeated calls for them to be made available, hundreds of homes have been lying empty while the death toll in homeless accommodation has mounted. Meanwhile, the hotels and B&Bs (the majority of which, in Glasgow, are owned by just two families) have made millions in profits, most of it coming out of taxpayers’ pockets while contributing nothing to a long-term solution.
The political climate in Scotland in recent years, led and driven by the Scottish Government, has made it difficult to raise women’s concerns, let alone have anyone pay attention or do anything. It’s been left to housing and women’s rights activists to stand up for some of the most vulnerable people in society and demand a homeless system that takes the needs of women and children into account.
Members of the Scottish Tenants Organisation will meet with Scottish Greens councillors Martha Wardrop (Hillhead) and Jon Molyneux (Pollokshields) tomorrow to discuss the homelessness crisis. We will share the accounts of women who have stayed in the hotels and B&Bs and put forward the demand for single-sex homeless accommodation. We can only hope that for once someone will listen to their pleas.
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Laura Jones is a housing and homelessness campaigner.
