Two years ago, Christie Gomez left her family, friends and hometown to flee an abusive husband and move to a Kissimmee motel room with her three children.
"Eventually he would have killed me," the 31-year-old said. "The anger-management classes he was ordered to take only made him more aggressive."
Gomez still had a roof over her head but no real home. And she was about to be booted from yet another rent-by-the-week motel when a social worker at her son's school referred the family to Harbor House, a domestic-violence program.
"There are a lot of families out there like hers," said Harbor House CEO Carol Wick. "Domestic-violence survivors are the forgotten faces of the homeless. They're an afterthought."
Several national surveys show 80 percent of women in homeless shelters report being abused by husbands, boyfriends or lovers at some point in their past, and up to 57 percent say such violence was the immediate cause of their homelessness. Yet public discussions on family homelessness typically focus on job loss, bankruptcy, foreclosure or other economic hardship, domestic-violence experts say.
They want everyone to be asked about domestic abuse when entering any type of shelter.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-homeless-women-domestic-violence-20140425,0,7395373.story
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