Housing ‘options’ and ‘poor choices’: lone mothers’ experiences of accessing homelessness help and in emergency and temporary accommodation

Lone mothers are disproportionately affected by homelessness. The statutory homelessness live tables reveal that during the first quarter of 2023, a total of 104,510 homeless households in temporary and emergency accommodation in England contained 36,180 lone mother households, in comparison to 19,550 couples with children (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 2023). In deconstructing lone mother homelessness, this study begins with the concept of lone mother identity. It examines the wider literature and finds that political and cultural symbolism ‘totalises’ the lone mother with a series of negative stereotypes and categorisations (May, 2010). Lone mothers receive scant recognition for the barriers they face in their efforts to achieve market and social participation alongside their role as mothers. Policymaking in welfare, employment, and housing exacerbates their social exclusion. Citizen obligations have replaced societal notions of citizen rights, and precarity pushes lone mothers involuntarily closer to the welfare state. Here, they are met with inculpation and coerced to compete harder as self-sufficient citizens. Two groups participate in this research, both of which are considered ‘hard to reach’: lone mother participants due to their precarious lives, and housing case workers due to institutional gatekeeping. A total of forty-seven lone mothers have supported this study by providing rich ontological narratives that describe their experiences of homelessness, as well as their thoughts and feelings, through forty-two surveys and nineteen interviews. A small number of housing case workers participated and contributed descriptions of the minutiae of the LAHD's practices through seven surveys and one interview. These contributions reveal how the work of Housing Case Workers is often influenced by societal constructions of lone mothers and homelessness. A Foucauldian approach to the analysis facilitates this exploration from the ‘top down’ (Hacking, 2004). Power/knowledge and discourse are practices that ‘discipline’ the subject, who must be ‘trained or corrected, classified, normalised, excluded’ (Foucault, 1975, p.191). Symbolic Interactionism offers perspectives from the ‘bottom up’ (Hacking, 2004) as lone mothers interact with housing case workers, with others excluded in emergency and temporary accommodation, and in their daily lives as they continue to mother and to participate in society. This blended analysis combines feminist approaches to provide a holistic account of the realities on the ground for lone mothers in the contemporary Western democracy. It explores the stories of lone mother participants, who are ‘the litmus test’ for all women (Skevik, 2005). It investigates political and institutional narratives, found to be inculcated with compelling discourses of freedom. These reinforce lone mother homelessness and veil the structural inadequacy of the housing system. The thesis finds that lone mothers are harshly governed not only by the state and its institutions, but also by the entire body politic, where stigma (Goffman, 1963) and hierarchisation are organising, disciplinary mechanisms (Foucault, 1975). Thus, this study contributes to the literature by challenging accepted power/knowledge, as lone mothers share their daily struggle, their adaptive identity work, their forced compliance, and their resistance. The study offers grounded conceptualisations through which the socio/economic independence of lone mother households can be recognised as pivotal in the establishment of an equitable and de-stratified society.

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