Homeless women are in severe need of our help. While residing as a member of the homeless community, they deserve access to safe and well-funded, women based shelters as well as governmental services to provide them with every possibility of personal progress and recovery.  Yet, they are often times denied this. 

The experiences of most homeless women are based around whether or not they have dependent children under their care. Their access to services and refuge are strongly impacted by motherhood, and in fact 90% of homeless families are led by young single mothers who lack both financial and emotional support systems. 37% of young homeless women experience sexual violation and aggression on the street every year, while 91% of homeless women have reported of a sexual based assault or a violent attack in their lifetime. Due to the outstanding dangers of living on the street, many women resort to prostitution/selling themselves for sexual services in order to have somewhere safe to sleep. Not only is this both physically and emotionally degrading for these women, but it continues to put them in further danger of being stolen for human trafficking and being the target of violent crimes. 

Despite the many dangers of living on the street for Canadian women, Statistics Canada released that over 1, 000 women and children are being turned away from shelters daily due to capacity limits, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only made this worse. Women truly do have the shortest end of the stick in regards to homelessness being that they receive fewer beds compared to men in homeless shelters system-wide, as there is a 30% bed limit for men and only a 13% limit for women. Although the leading cause of women's homelessness in Canada is domestic violence, 1 in 5 women will return to their abuser because they feel that the abuse they face on the streets and within shared shelters are much worse. 

Why do women need shelters of their own? Because homeless men and women face different problems. A majority of unwanted pregnancies occur within shelter walls, because women are still at risk of rape and violence despite finding themselves within a refuge. This is why it is imperative that there are well-funded shelters based solely for those who identify as female, which encompasses 36% of all homeless individuals. 

Kaitlin Schwan, senior researcher at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness said that “The hidden nature of women’s homelessness can become invisible at the policy level and so we don’t get the kind of investments and funding that we really need to address the issue.” Let's change that together.