She reported the sexual assault, spoke to police, gave statements, and endured the forensic examination, the interviews and the repeated retelling of one of the most traumatic experiences of her life.
Days later, the email arrived to inform her that her lease would not be renewed.
Not the man accused of sexually assaulting her that lives right next door.
Her.
By the time the criminal legal system had finished taking her statement, the housing provider had already begun removing her from the only place she called home.
It is difficult to imagine a clearer example of how Australia responds to women who experience violence. We tell women to come forward. We tell them they will be believed. We tell them to report. Yet, all too often, reporting violence simply marks the beginning of another form of punishment.
The violence itself becomes only one chapter in a much longer story of institutional abandonment.
The woman at the centre of this story asked Sisters Inside to tell it.
She has chosen to speak publicly, while remaining de-identified, because she does not want another woman to endure what she has experienced. She hopes that by sharing what happened to her, someone else might be spared the same treatment.
“People just keep sweeping things under the rug,” she told us. “That’s why I think it’s important… so this doesn’t happen again.”
The woman at the centre of this story is Aboriginal. She lives with disability. She has experienced imprisonment. Like many criminalised women, she has spent years trying to rebuild her life while navigating systems that seem incapable of seeing anything beyond the labels attached to her name. Those labels matter, not because they should, but because they shape how institutions respond. Every interaction she has had with housing providers, police, family policing and government agencies has carried the assumption that she is the problem to be managed rather than the person requiring protection.
When she spoke with Sisters Inside, one sentence captured years of accumulated harm: “I really feel locally hated.”
That feeling did not emerge because of one incident. It has been built over years. Years of homelessness. Years of asking for help. Years of discovering that every time she met the conditions imposed on her, another condition appeared.
For five years she has been trying to secure stable housing from public housing. Five years of applications, waiting lists, referrals and promises. She was initially told the wait might be three years. Then it became five. Now she is being told it could be ten.
Before she eventually secured a room, there were periods where the only shelter available to her was a tent.
She remembers being handed a tent by a homelessness service because there was nowhere else for her to go. When she pitched it in Musgrave Park, she says she was quickly told to move on.
“I’m a 46-year-old Aboriginal woman. This is our land, right? I put up a tent because I had nowhere else to go. Someone came over and said the police would be here in less than half an hour because I wasn’t allowed to camp there anymore.”
She paused before continuing.
“This is where the Elders sat to look after this park. This is where I camped last time I was here.”
There is something profoundly revealing about that moment.
An Aboriginal woman, made homeless in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, is threatened with police for sheltering on Aboriginal land while thousands of perfectly liveable homes across the city sit empty.
Eventually, after years of instability, she secured accommodation in a privately managed apartment complex. It was not luxury. She describes it simply as “a big ghetto”. But it was hers. It was somewhere she could finally begin rebuilding a life that had already demanded more resilience than anyone should ever have to find.
Then another tenant sexually assaulted her. She reported it. The man was later granted bail with conditions that, she says, prohibit him from residing at the complex.
Days later, she was informed that her lease would not be renewed.
She believes that once she is forced out, he will be able to return. Sisters Inside cannot verify that claim. What is clear, however, is that the practical outcome is exactly that: the woman who reported the alleged assault is now searching for somewhere else to live, while she fears the man who assaulted her will ultimately regain access to the property.
Whether intentional or not, the message this sends to women is unmistakable: report violence, and you may lose your home.
Throughout our conversation, she returned repeatedly to one question.
“Why am I the one who has to leave?”
It is a question that reaches far beyond her own circumstances.
Women experiencing domestic and sexual violence are routinely expected to uproot their lives while those responsible remain largely uninterrupted. They leave their homes, schools, jobs, communities and support networks. They disappear from neighbourhoods they once called home. Their children lose stability. Their lives become organised around survival.
The violence moves them, and the system moves them again. This is presented as protection. It is more accurately called, displacement.
In the days following the assault, she found herself moving once again between agencies, assessments, referrals and waiting lists. Every service seemed responsible for one small piece of the crisis, yet no one could answer the most urgent question: where would she sleep?
She describes approaching service after service, only to encounter the familiar bureaucracy of eligibility criteria, referrals and limited options. Some agencies could offer temporary accommodation. Others could offer waiting lists. Years earlier, when she had nowhere to go, the only shelter available to her had been a tent.
What she needed was someone prepared to stand beside her and refuse to let her navigate another crisis alone.
For her, that person was Sarah*[1], her caseworker at Sisters Inside.
Without hesitation, she says she does not believe she would have survived without her.
“If I didn’t have someone like Sarah in my life, I honestly don’t know how long I’d even be here today.”*
She describes Sarah* as family.
Not because Sisters Inside receives funding to provide intensive housing support, crisis advocacy or around-the-clock accompaniment. Much of what Sarah* did fell well beyond what the organisation is funded to provide. She became family because she refused to let another woman disappear through the gaps between systems.
While agencies debated eligibility, referrals and whose responsibility she was, Sarah* was advocating with housing providers, accompanying her to appointments, challenging decisions and making sure she was not left to face the aftermath alone.
The contrast is impossible to ignore.
The tragedy is not simply that this woman found someone willing to stand beside her. The tragedy is that her survival depended on it. No woman’s safety should hinge on whether she is fortunate enough to encounter an exceptional worker willing to carry responsibilities that should belong to the system itself.
This woman’s story is not exceptional.
That is precisely why she wanted it told.
She did not speak to Sisters Inside because she wanted sympathy. She spoke because she wants the next woman to be treated differently. She wants the systems that failed her to be scrutinised before they fail someone else.
As she told us, “People just keep sweeping things under the rug.”
This story refuses to let that happen.
That is precisely why it demands attention.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, hundreds of homes sit vacant across Brisbane’s inner suburbs. More than 400 inactive dwellings exist in both Brisbane CBD and the Newstead–Bowen Hills area alone. Around another 200 remain empty in West End, Fortitude Valley and Kangaroo Point respectively. These are not abandoned ruins. They are homes identified through government administrative records and electricity usage as sitting empty while Australia’s housing crisis deepens.
Every empty apartment, house and unit tells us something uncomfortable: homelessness is not simply the consequence of a housing shortage. It is the consequence of political choices.
We have chosen to treat housing as an investment before treating it as somewhere someone can live. We have chosen vacancy over shelter, profit over safety and property values over human lives.
That reality becomes impossible to ignore when women escaping violence are told there is nowhere for them to go while thousands of homes stand empty.
This is not simply an individual tragedy. It is the predictable outcome of a housing system that treats homes primarily as financial assets rather than places where people live safely.
Housing rights advocate Jordan van den Lamb, better known as Purple Pingers, says this woman’s experience exposes the broader consequences of a housing system that has become detached from the human need for shelter.
‘There are so many things wrong with our housing system, like the fact over 100,000 homes sit empty or underutilised in metropolitan Melbourne when around 30,000 people in the entire state of Victoria are experiencing homelessness, but this story demonstrates one of the untold and compounding effects of a system that treats housing as an investment rather than a human need.
For decades, society’s attitude towards sexual violence has been changing but the data shows this violence remains unchanged or is getting worse. Women are unable to flee from dangerous situations when there is nowhere to go or nowhere they can afford, resulting in situations where women are forced to give birth in tents in the middle of our cities. This is an absolutely outrageous failure of governments that continue to prioritise investment profits over human lives despite constant rhetoric that promises to leave no one behind.’
Van den Lamb argues that the same political choices underpin both Australia’s housing crisis and the treatment of people experiencing homelessness.
‘The idea that the State uses police to violently remove rough sleepers in encampments across the country whilst they sleep meters away from empty dwellings is heartbreaking, but it demonstrates the system they are here to enforce. These police exist to protect the private property and profits of the rich, at the expense of ordinary people.
When an ordinary person suffers sexual violence, the system jumps into gear to protect its profit from any hassle that might arise, knowing it’ll probably be easier to extract rent from someone else.’
This woman’s experience illustrates precisely that intersection. Her story cannot be understood solely as one woman’s experience of sexual violence, or solely as a housing issue. It sits at the point where gendered violence, racism, homelessness, poverty and the commodification of housing collide.
For Aboriginal women, disabled women, formerly incarcerated women and women living in poverty, violence rarely exists as a single event. Housing cannot be understood separately from policing. Policing cannot be understood separately from family policing. Family policing cannot be understood separately from poverty. Poverty cannot be understood separately from racism. Each system hands women to the next, producing a revolving door of surveillance, exclusion and instability.
By the time many women report sexual violence, they have already spent years being failed by every institution that claimed it would keep them safe.
This story matters because it is so ordinary. It’s one that Sisters Inside hears in various forms, over and over again. They’re different women in different suburbs. They have different perpetrators, but all these stories have the same outcomes.
Women who survive violence should not also have to survive homelessness. They should not have to prove themselves deserving of safety. They should not lose the only home they have because someone else chose to harm them.
Until governments confront the structural failures driving both gendered violence and housing insecurity, this will continue to happen.
The question is no longer whether Australia has a housing crisis. We absolutely know that it does.
The question is what kind of society leaves thousands of homes empty while telling women escaping violence that there is simply nowhere for them to go, and what kind of society tells an Aboriginal woman there is no place for her, even on the land her people have cared for since time immemorial.