Towards the end of my doctoral research, which had focused on the women of St Ann’s estate, I began to speak about St Ann’s and my research at conferences and workshops. I was always asked, ‘Where are the men?’ Although I had not consciously excluded them from the research, or from my findings, the fact remained that the men in St Ann’s were missing. In trying to understand why they appeared to be missing, I thought about the connections the women and myself had with the men during the research process. When I visited the women’s homes, if there were men in the house, they were always leaving – none of them ever wanted to stay around a group of women, talking about the community and family life in St Ann’s. On very rare occasions, a visiting babyfather, or brother, or friend, might hang about out of curiosity. During the early years of my research I focused on the group of mothers using the local community centre as a meeting place, and women were well represented in the local services and at schools, but there were very few men in those community spaces.

The women were not overly concerned about these ‘missing men’; the community centre, the schools, the housing office and the local precinct – these were their spaces, and the men had little involvement in their activities and daily lives. There were many reasons for their absence, some of which I knew at the time. Many of the men did not live with the women they had relationships with on a full-time basis because it made little economic sense to the family to have a man ‘officially’ living at the address who was unemployed or employed in unstable and very low-paid work. Sometimes the men were involved in an ‘underground’ criminal economy (which thrives in this neighbourhood), handling stolen goods, or drug dealing at various levels. Having a man full time in your home therefore often carried too much risk, and the women told me that they did not want the police ‘kicking down the door’ looking for whoever, or whatever, putting their tenancy at risk, as it was usually the women who held the tenancies for the houses on the estate. In addition, these men had an occupational hazard of going to jail and were thus unreliable as full-time partners.