Private shelters undercut domestic violence services with market-focused messaging
For-profit companies are capturing domestic violence shelter clients by marketing themselves as flexible, individual-focused alternatives to nonprofit women's shelters—a shift that researchers warn may force traditional shelters to compromise their specialized approach to gendered violence. The trend reveals how neoliberal market logic is reshaping a core social safety net.
Originaltitel: In the business of gendered violence: the private shelter discourse in Sweden
<p>For-profit companies have begun competing with women’s shelters for ‘clients’ trying to escape violence. Using discourse theory, this study examines how 20 private shelters describe their business. The analysis shows that private shelters describe themselves as: (1) having a broad expertise and target group: (2) being able to tend to the individual needs of any client; and (3) being highly available and flexible. We understand this as an expression of a neoliberal market discourse and as a way to differentiate themselves from women’s shelters. This may put pressure on women’s shelters to provide similar ‘inclusion’, availability and flexibility. Furthermore: (4) private shelters contribute to shaping a desirable neoliberal subject, that is, a self-reliant woman; and (5), by articulating needs as individual and inherently mundane, they lean more towards ‘providing accommodation’ than addressing the particularities of (gendered) violence.</p>