Title: Women escaping domestic violence to achieve safe housing: An integrative review
Version: 3 Date: 23 Mar 2024
Reviewer's report:
This is a highly important area of study, and I commend the authors for their work in this area.
When discussing terminology, it is unclear on the background on page 3 whether you are
including family violence in your definition, or only intimate partner. Additionally, while this
section states DV will be used in this paper aside from direct quotes, there are several instances
where other acronyms are used (i.e., twice on page 16,  page 19, page 21). And on page 6 you
use "DV and IPV." Including both is fine of course, that just needs to be made clear.
The background gives a great overview of the topic and why it is relevant. There are some minor
grammatical issues throughout the background section, including dangling modifiers. I believe
this section could be reworked to clarify many of the sentences and improve the flow between
paragraphs.
The methods section is strong overall. However, I do have one concern. For the search terms,
what section was each term applied to (e.g., title, abstract, full-text, etc.)? That is an important
detail as it has a significant impact on the literature you will find when performing these searches.
I believe the "Integrative review analysis" section contains elements that should be in the
methods, rather than in the results where this section is placed currently. Specifically, the way
you developed your codes falls under methods rather than results. Additionally, please say more
about how these codes were generated. Are you pulling codes reported by the authors of each
study and compiling those, or reading the entire manuscript and generating unique codes from
there? It would helpful to explain a bit more of how that process went.
The quotes on page 11 in the second full paragraph are missing a citation of where they are
quoted from.
In results section 2.1, financial insecurity, financial abuse that occurs during the relationship
prior to leaving is not included. I see that you have included this in your discussion - did this
barrier not come up in any of the selected articles?
Results section 2.2 - I feel that the results reported stray somewhat from the overall sub-theme
here. Particularly in the second paragraph, you describe how women felt "unsupported," which
is different from feeling judged. The third and fourth paragraphs even more so talks about a lack
of service availability, which is unrelated to the theme of being judged. For example, on page
14, "...only available after an episode of violence" is not a judgment, but an actual lack of service
availability, as are "obstructive screening policies" and a lack of services existing in the area. In
reading this section, it looks like the results warrant a separate theme on service availability, as
this narrative does not relate back to the theme of this section.
Results section 3.2 - it is not clear what the distinction is between this section and 3.1 above.
Both discuss "support" from providers and offer considerations for formal services.
Results section 3.3 - how does peer support fit with the rest of the results here? Or how is that
piece of information helpful for the audience of this paper? While absolutely a potentially helpful
resource, it doesn't quite fit in this section as currently written.  I'm not saying it doesn't belong,
but rather that perhaps it is a separate theme, or can be integrated more clearly into the rest of
the section.
Page 17 - "...grants increased women's ability to parent their children..." What grants are you
referring to here?
The discussion, while a comprehensive overview of the key findings, also seems to present a
new set of themes, separate from those in the results section. There are also several instances
(such as the second paragraph on page 18) where new quotes or other new information from
the studies reviewed is presented. Please ensure that the discussion does not present any new
findings, and that all findings from this review are included instead in the results section.
I appreciate that financial abuse is included as a barrier to leaving in the discussion, as this is
hugely important especially around barriers to leaving. However, I wonder if it would be worth
discussing this in the background/literature review section, since it is so prevalent and often
highly impactful for victim decision-making.
I would suggest including a limitations section. Some limitations could include the different
contexts of DV/IPV globally as these studies are from several different countries, or the possible
missing of articles that accompanies any kind of database search.  I also wonder what the
demographic breakdowns, particularly around race/ethnicity, were for the included studies.
Some spacing issues throughout the manuscript, including in the references.
Overall, this is an important topic and this review has the potential to add to the literature in
this area. I believe the results and discussion need some restructuring for clarity. Explicating in
more detail how themes were reached would also be helpful in making sense of the themes as
they are reported here.