Abstract
Laura Huey and Ryan Broll’s book, Becoming Strong: Impoverished Women and the Struggle to Overcome Violence, is a qualitative study featuring women experiencing homelessness. Huey and Broll include within their book findings and quotations from 187 qualitative interviews, which took place in Chicago and Detroit. The purpose of this study was to come to a greater understanding of how women who are homeless view themselves in regard to their experiences with victimization and their ability to overcome these experiences. What unfolds is a complicated and stirring picture of women who have experienced complex trauma and yet still find the courage to keep going. Huey and Broll ultimately argue for an expanded view of resilience that allows resilience to be understood as a process of becoming rather than a defined state. They conclude that resources available to women enduring homelessness should use the principles of strengths-based, trauma-informed care to meet the women where they are and allow for flexibility in their recovery process. Ultimately, the authors argue that the women are strong and capable of plotting their own path to healing and only require peer and individualized support to continue along their journeys.
A strength of Huey and Broll’s book is their ability to present their study without it reading like an academic paper. The women are introduced with the use of pseudonyms, and the authors use the women’s own words to describe their individual journeys. Rather than reading like a research report, the book reads as an autobiographical and biographical gloss of 187 women who are living without benefit of sustained apartments or homes. In academic writing, we tend to break down participants into different categories and convey their commonalities by reporting their ages, gender, income, and other key demographic attributes. It is easy to forget that the participants included in the study are individuals with rich life trajectories. The authors do an excellent job of presenting the women as unique individuals while also discussing the qualitative themes they identified. You become connected to these women as they describe their journeys through countless trials of victimization. Your heart breaks as you read story after story of pain and tragedy. You forget about the research project and begin to see the women for who they really are: survivors. By presenting the women as survivors, Huey and Broll are inherently feminist in their refusal to identify the women as merely victims. Within their qualitative questioning, Huey and Broll utilize a strengths-based, empowerment approach that highlights the women’s resilience.
By interweaving statistics on prevalence with the qualitative themes and examples of the women’s own voices, the book becomes a comprehensive source of knowledge for anyone who is interested in learning more about the lives of women who are homeless and victims. Social work readers will connect with the authors’ concluding remarks on the importance of using strengths-based, trauma-informed care in practice. But in my view, anyone who is passionate about issues affecting women will find this book compelling. Because of its readability, I would recommend this book to anyone, from my colleagues involved in advanced research about violence against women to my mother. This book is an admirable piece of literature, and it has inspired me to continue doing the work I do.
