Homeless Women Speak out
In 2008 alone, Laurie McGinley has met ten new women who have joined the community of homeless women living around the district of the Beaudry metro station. Laurie is homeless herself, and has been so for the last fifteen years. She and many other homeless women spend their time around this particular metro station because it is located close to one of Montreal’s few homeless shelters devoted solely to women: The Patricia Mackenzie Pavillion of the Old Brewery Mission.
“They all end up close to this place, all taking up more room and taking more of the cut of the money we get from panhandling. These women come from nowhere, no home, and from everywhere. I know they’re new to my life and this life because they all like telling their stories. The sad part is, I still see women that were here before me, when I was just a kid, and they still have nowhere to go,” says Laurie, who has set up a small fort of blankets in the park behind Beaudry metro.
Laurie is all to aware of the extreme difficulty of being a woman living on the streets. The few shelters that do exist in Montreal are all filled everynight without exception. The problem is, however, that the majority of these shelters cater to either men only or both sexes. There are not enough shelters that recognize a woman’s need for privacy and safety, even if she is coming off the street. Many women feel uncomfortable sleeping in close quarters with men she does not know or trust.
“Even if I get into one of the other places, there are guys in there. I don’t know them, they could be messed up and dangerous. Who’s there to guard my stuff, to guard me? What security do I have to make sure these guys don’t go for me in the middle of the night?” asks homeless woman Tammy, who prefers her family name to remain anonymous.
During the winter, women like Tammy and Laurie often choose to stay up at night in 24 hour establishments like Tim Hortons and MacDonalds. They cannot sleep in the metro stations because of constant police patrols, and if the shelters are full, their only other alternative is braving the cold and facing the possibility of freezing to death. Even when the weather is warm enough to sleep outside, they face the constant possibility of being robbed or raped due to the natural vulnerability of being a woman.
“They live in a constant state of fatigue and fear. This stress drives them further into the rut that they’re in, towards booze, drugs, and even prostitution. We’re here to give aid and a bed and whatever support we can offer, but a for special services, especially for women, well it’s virtually non-existant compared to the sheer number of women who need help” says Jasmina Lukanovich who volunteers in multiple Montreal homeless shelters and helped to organize Concordia’s “5 days for the homeless” to raise funds for Montreal’s homeless youth.
The cycle of stress, fatigue, alcohol and drugs that Lukanovich speaks of is one that Montreal’s homeless women are finding hard to break. Even though there are difficult problems for the city to offer solutions to, such as individual counselling and substance abuse rehabilitaion, there are also simpler problems that could be resolved with just a little attention and funding. One of these is the women’s need for sanitary napkins and tampons.
“If only we had somewhere that would give us stuff to keep clean. Not like with drugs clean but just our bodies in general, to take care of ourselves, especially for when it’s that time of the month. Nothing makes me feel worse that having nothing to take care of it. If I choose between food or pads, I’m going to eat,” says Manon, a 42 year old homeless woman living in the area around the Berri-UQuam metro station.
Is is proven that women are much more likely to suffer from depression if they are unable to take care of their own personal hygiene. Along with somewhere to provide them with sanitary supplies, they are also in dire need of somewhere to use washroom facilities such as a toilet, sink, and shower. Without these things, these women find it impossible to make themselves presentable enough to find any sort of work other than the jobs offered to them on the street, such as dealing in drugs and prostitution.
As a city Montreal needs to recognize the specific needs of Montreal’s homeless women. There are shelters and volunteers doing their part to ease the struggle of the homeless, but the testimonials of women like Laurie and Tammy show that some of the problems that homeless women face have solutions that are within our reach.
Comparing Soundslides: Washington Post vs. NY Times
While I enjoyed both stories, especially the striking images, the Washington Post story made me feel much closer to the issue being reported. I found myself sympathizing with the deportees because I was able to hear their personal testimonials. There is something about hearing a the subject of the story’s voice that changes the information being presented. The reporter’s voiceover from the NY Times soundslides was very clear and tied in perfectly with the photographs. However the fact that an outsider was reporting on the camps in Kandahar creates an intermediary that distances the listener from those living in the camps. The Washington Post piece had no such intermediary and therefore I felt as though the detainees were speaking directly to me about their experience. Subconsciously, this made the information seem more truthful because I knew it had not been processed by someone else.
I have already planned to use soundslides for my project. I will do it in a way that is very similar to the Washington Post story, by interviewing homeless women about their personal experiences and accompanying the interviews with portraits of the speaker.
The Struggle of Montreal’s Homeless Women
When the winter holidays are over, many Montrealers feel the weight of wintertime blues. Freezing temperatures can sometimes last well into March, and there is little to look forward to other than an occasional glimpse of sun and not-quite-warm days that turn snowfall into slush. But if these months are the most depressing time of the year for the average Montreal citizen, imagine the suffering endured by the city’s homeless — in particular, Montreal’s homeless women.
For homeless women that live in the Montreal area, winter is a deadly challenge. There are a limited number of shelters that cater specifically to women, and those — without exception — are over capacity by six o’clock every night. If the shelters are full, homeless women face a much more complicated predicament in finding a place to sleep than homeless men. This is because of a woman’s vulnerability — as noted in Common Occurrence: The Impact of Homelessness on Women’s Health , “it is well documented that many women who are experiencing visible homelessness (and therefore using emergency hostels) have long and complex histories of abuse, often beginning when they were children”.
Because women living on the streets are ten times more likely to be sexually assaulted than men, they don’t feel safe sleeping in secluded areas. From a survey of 97 homeless women in Toronto in 2007, 37% had been physically assaulted and 21% had been raped or sexually assaulted at least once in the past year. The second safest option after a shelter if a woman fears being raped or robbed is a relatively public place. Unfortunately, these women can’t sleep for more than a few hours in any public area such as a metro station because they will inevitably be woken up by the police and forced to relocate.
The study on the impact of homelessness on women’s health found that “there is a feeling among many women that they are not [even] safe in shelters and emergency hostels. This [is] related to perceptions of inadequate overnight staffing in houses with women dealing with many serious issues.” Instead, many of them spend their night guzzling coffee in 24 hour Tim Horton’s, or simply wandering the streets for hours until the daytime shelters are open. As a result, 68% of homeless women interviewed for the Street Health Report in 2007 reported living with extreme fatigue.
The fact that homeless women not only have to constantly search for somewhere warm to survive the winter months, but that it must also be safe from the threat of attack is something that is severely affecting their health and hampering their ability to get back on their feet. According to the study titled the Impact of Homelessness on Women’s Health, “unrelenting, debilitating stress and anxiety top the list of impacts,” however, “depression, despair and hopelessness are also major impacts, as is the exacerbation of existing mental health and addiction issues.”
Other than the issue of shelter and safety, homeless women must find a place to wash their clothes and their bodies. This is important part of their lifestyle that, if not satisfied, takes a serious toll on their mental wellbeing. The Street Health Report has determined that this mental stress is a result of the women being unable to maintain any sense of dignity or self-worth if they cannot first maintain their personal hygiene.
Women have needs that are very specific to their gender, and homeless women find themselves in a vicious cycle of hunger, lack of security, mental stress, and constant fatigue. Whether it is something as simple as somewhere to find pads and tampons or something as complex as counseling for the variety of mental health issues that plague them, homeless women are in dire need of help to escape the stress of poverty and assault. “Programs and services expressed concern that they are not able to help build social supports of women because their resources are exhausted dealing with more basic, day-to-day, health or safety issues of women”, according to the Street Health Survey in 2007. “The staggering levels of violence experienced by women who are homeless [because of] the vulnerabl[e] position that poverty puts [them] in and the lack of safety [they] must live with everday” must be addressed because with each passing winter, there are more and more homeless women facing all of these issues alone on the streets of Montreal.
