Because of the tense situation on the housing market, there are women who, after spending time in a shelter, return to a violent relationship, according to Andrée Birnbaum.
Speaking in an interview with RTL Radio on Wednesday, Birnbaum highlighted that the association manages two women’s shelters, primarily for emergency situations when women urgently need to leave their homes. However, due to the lack of available accommodation, women who are housed in emergency shelters cannot leave, causing a backlog. “The problem is that there is no other accommodation available afterwards,” Birnbaum explained, adding that this situation ultimately forces some women to return to the very housing arrangements they wanted to leave behind.
The waiting lists are long: “60 women and 76 children are waiting to be housed in women’s shelters. Four of these women are also pregnant,” Birnbaum explained. She deplores that the situation ultimately forces some women to return to housing arrangements that they actually wanted to leave behind, because they have no other choice.
Birnbaum also mentioned that there has been an increase in the number of individuals seeking assistance from the association who do not fall within its target demographic. This includes entire families who struggle to find housing and people from overseas who receive job offers but face difficulties settling in the country due to various reasons such as not getting the job or not being able to secure accommodation.
Birnbaum clarified that while Femmes en détresse empathizes with these cases, they cannot be held responsible for providing assistance as they lack the necessary means to do so. Instead, she urges the country’s social offices “to differentiate more between the people they have to deal with before referring them to Femmes en détresse.”
For Andrée Birnbaum, housing is currently the most pressing issue. She argues that it greatly aggravates the situation of women and children who are already struggling. Femmes en détresse offers a variety of options for victims, for example accommodations under social rental management. However, there are reportedly not enough staff to manage these homes or to provide appropriate support to those who live there. There are currently 80 follow-up meetings taking place, each lasting two and a half hours per week. However, this is “in addition to the actual work of the association” and is “difficult to keep up,” according to Birnbaum. But these follow-up meetings are still important, because Femmes en détresse is not a housing service, but an association that is there to help women in distress and their children get back on their feet.
Femmes en détresse demands that the housing crisis should be tackled in an interministerial way. “If we could solve this problem, we would solve many social problems,” Birnbaum concluded.
