Housing, Violence and Homelessness in Rural Australia

This book reframes housing as essential safety infrastructure, demonstrating how safety, stability and recovery are shaped by place, community and connection. Through its focus on rural experiences, it offers a compelling analysis of the conditions that enable women and children to live free from violence without sacrificing the people, places and identities that sustain them. We can learn much from rural contexts in how we think about housing, safety and belonging, in our collective efforts to eliminate violence against women.

-Professor Sarah Wendt, University of Melbourne

This Pivot book examines the complex relationship between domestic and family violence, homelessness and rural life in Australia. Challenging conventional understandings of homelessness, the book argues that housing is not simply a response to violence but a form of safety infrastructure. Bringing together theory, policy analysis and practitioner evidence from a rural homelessness service, it explores how violence, housing scarcity, cultural safety, visibility, trust, and service systems shape women’s pathways to safety. The book introduces the concepts of spatial safety, constrained agency, and intersectional rurality to explain why women are often forced to choose between safety and belonging. Offering important insights for researchers, policymakers and practitioners, it presents a systems-based framework for creating safer rural communities.

Dr Helena Menih is Senior Lecturer in Crime, Justice and Legal Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University, Australia. Her research focuses on domestic and family violence, gender-based violence, homelessness, family law, criminal justice, and the social and structural factors that shape vulnerability and exclusion. Drawing on both academic scholarship and professional practice, her work examines the intersections of violence, housing insecurity, justice systems, and social policy to inform policy, practice, and social justice outcomes. This book reflects her longstanding interest in the relationship between violence, housing, place, and women’s pathways to safety, recovery, and belonging in contemporary Australia.