HOMELESS WOMEN AND CHILDREN

Homeless Women and Children

Homeless Women and Children

“Homeless women,” “shopping-bag ladies,” or “urban transient females” are labels used for women who have no established residence, wander idly from place to place without visible means of support, and are living on the streets due to a situational housing problem. As with homeless men, these women are considered to be members of the penniless segment of society, with local variations in lifestyle and in relative numbers; they are found in all major cities in the United States and other nations in both the developed and developing world.

There is no way to determine the true number of these types of homeless women in the United States; an accurate measure does not exist, and all figures are estimates. Estimates from the 1990 U.S. Census indicate that there are 282,372 homeless people in the United States, and approximately 25 percent are female. Coston (1989) believes that there are fewer homeless women because the U.S. social system is used more by females than by males. The majority (71 percent) of recorded homeless females live in major cities, 21 percent are in the suburbs and the urban fringe, and 9 percent occupy rural areas. Compared with all U.S. adults, the female homeless are disproportionately black non-Hispanics (U.S. Housing and Urban Development 1996). The racial or ethnic makeup of homeless people does not differ according to family status. Thirty-eight percent of single homeless females have dropped out of high school, and although 34 percent of them have a high school diploma, fewer than 25 percent have any education beyond high school (U.S. Housing and Urban Development 1996). Homeless females are less educated than the mainstream adult population of females in the United States, based on the finding that “only 25% of American adults have less than a high school education, 34% have a high school diploma, and 45% have some education beyond high school” (U.S. Housing and Urban Development 1996: 2).

Literature regarding homeless women is scarce and runs the gamut from newspaper articles and essays to dramatized pictorials of these women. The few ethnographic and scientific survey research articles have focused on their lifestyle characteristics, including, but not limited to, their modes of survival, reasons for living on the streets, interactions with the police, worries, criminal victimization experiences, use of protective behaviors, and fear of crime.

Factors Leading To Homelessness

Homelessness has been recognized as a significant social problem in the United States for many years. In the early 1980s, when homelessness gained prominence as a social phenomenon, the views of the issues it posed were relatively simple. Some researchers believed that the problem was temporary, due to the recession from 1981 to 1982, and that the problem would go away when the economy recovered; others believed that homelessness arose from a shortage of decent, low-cost housing and that the homeless represented a cross-section of poor Americans. Over the past twenty years, however, researchers and practitioners have suggested more complex explanations for homelessness among women (Martin 1983; Coston ...