Women seeking refuge from their abusers are ending up stuck in often unsuitable accommodation in motel rooms amid a critical shortage of safe and affordable housing in Ballarat, according to local family violence advocates.

“It is a last resort. But we don’t have enough crisis and refuge accommodation for those who do have to be hidden away, and we’re not really good enough at keeping people safe in their own place,” says Jocelyn Bignold, CEO of McAuley House, a longer-term community housing service for women.

High demand for affordable and social housing in the area adds to the pressures.

Lacking amenity and isolating victim-survivors from their support networks, Bignold says motels are not suitable for use as crisis housing.

But in the absence of anything else, they can be paid for by women fleeing violence using a family violence Flexible Support Package (FSP) provided by the state government. These packages can pay for often costly motel accommodation while awaiting openings in local refuges.

Frontline workers have raised safety concerns for women using these ad hoc arrangements. Motels lack crucial security infrastructure, including CCTV and staffed reception, and proximity hospitals, supermarkets and public transport.

Then there is the question of their suitability for daily life. “Some hotels don’t even have kettles anymore,” says Bignold. “Can you imagine being in a motel room for two weeks with one child, let alone more than one child, or even by yourself? Looking at four walls, not sure if it’s safe to go out?

“If he knows where you are, it’s highly likely that he’s texting you or he’s using social media to try and get you and say, ‘Hey, come on, come home, I didn’t really mean it, it’s not that bad’. So then the risk is you second guess yourself and think, oh, maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe, maybe he’ll change, he says he’s going to change.”

“It’s just all too hard, or go home.”

Sources say crisis services give victim survivors at the highest level of risk priority for a refuge over a motel wherever possible. But McAuley House has appealed to the Victorian Government to stop using motel rooms as a “first form” of crisis housing, calling for longer-term supported accommodation which would provide 24/7 accessibility, face-to-face case management, self-contained rooms and emotional support.

Questioned about the use of motels for crisis accommodation, the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing declined to comment.

It’s understood there is a program underway to provide five new refuges across Victoria, enabling around 197 households to be supported at any one time, compared to 124 prior to the program.

Victoria’s regional housing crisis is piling disproportionate stress on women and children escaping violence, says Bignold. “For women, if there’s nowhere to go, you can’t leave.”

Ballarat experiences substantially higher rates of family violence compared to the rest of Victoria, according to data kept by the Crime Statistics Agency.

Victoria Police responded to family violence incidents in Ballarat at a rate 31.5 per cent higher than the state average in 2022-2023. Family violence incidents increased by 9.5 per cent in that period, with 2,235 incidents reported, equivalent to six a day, in Ballarat alone.

There has been an increase in recent months in calls to the government supported The Orange Door crisis service for people at risk in the Central Highlands area, a government spokesperson confirmed.

The fallout is plain to see on the ground. Stacey Park, team leader of Uniting’s Central Highlands Street to Home program, says every one of their 102 women clients experiencing rough sleeping, or at risk of homelessness, has also experienced “significant, high risk, family violence”.

The agency, which provides generalist homelessness support across the region, has been “inundated” amid the cost-of-living crisis.

“It’s really hard to continually be the face of noes,” says Park.

“It’s not nice having to continue saying, ‘you’re on a waitlist, we’re really hoping that you’ll have support at some point, we’re hoping that accommodation will come up at some point.’ But how long is that away?”

In Ballarat, the number of women presenting to specialist family violence support services experiencing homelessness increased by 6.7% in the last year according to the 2022-2023 Specialist Homelessness Services report.

Alongside greater support for longer-term accommodation for victim-survivors, Ballarat family violence lawyer, Ingrid Irwin, is calling for more accommodation for perpetrators.

“Uprooting a woman and her children from their home, their schooling, their neighbours, their friends, their family, their support networks” is essentially punishing the victim for speaking up, she says.

“That’s teaching children that are fleeing violence with that parent, usually a mother, that this is the consequence when you speak up, you get punished, you lose your comfort zone, you lose everything that you know.”

In May, in the aftermath of the alleged murders of three women in Ballarat this year, Samantha Murphy, Rebecca Young and Hannah McGuire, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan announced Ballarat would host a four-year-trial “saturation model” of behaviour change policies and interventions including targeting men at risk of using violence and a $100 million community advertising campaign raising awareness about gendered violence.

A Department of Families, Fairness and Housing spokesperson said the 2024-25 state budget invested $72.1 million over two years to provide immediate support and emergency accommodation for survivors of family violence who can’t stay safely at home.

This is part of Building Ballarat, a reporting project by the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne co-published with the Ballarat Courier.