Chantelle Langdon

Thesis: From ‘Band-Aids’ to Bricks and Mortar: Improving long-term housing pathways for victim survivors of domestic and family violence in Victoria, Australia

Biography

Chantelle Langdon is a PhD student with the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, supervised by Dr. Kate Hutton Burns and Dr. Naomi Pfitzner. In 2019, Chantelle completed her Honours degree at Monash University and was awarded the 2020 Best Masters/ Honours thesis award from ANZSOC for her first-class honours thesis exploring the conditions of crisis hotels used for homeless clients in Victoria, and the issues associated the amenity and dignity of these spaces.

Chantelle then worked as a Teaching Associate, Research Assistant and a Social Worker in the crisis homelessness space, where she witnessed the lack of long term-resources available for homelessness clients, a large portion of whom were victim-survivors of domestic violence. This inspired her to pursue her PhD research, which commenced in 2025, and combines her research background and frontline social work experience.

Thesis summary

Chantelle’s PhD is exploring the lack of long-term accommodation options available for victim-survivors of domestic violence and the ways in which this lack of options is resulting in some victim-survivors returning to abusive partners. Chantelle’s research will be analysing this problem from a policy standpoint as well as considering the structural and gendered underpinnings of this problem and how these culminate in a lack of choice and autonomy for victim-survivors trying to stay out of abusive relationships.

Supervisors: Dr Kate Burns, Dr Naomi Pfitzner