Tina McDowell runs Sgt. McDowell’s Military Relief, a nonprofit started by her late brother-in-law that helps Portland-area veterans connect with social services and escape homelessness. Last fall she noticed an increase in the number of women seeking out her services. She used to get about one call a month from a female, but between August and September alone, eight female veterans reached out to her, looking for help getting off the streets and into housing.
This was no fluke. What McDowell is seeing is part of a national upward trend in female veterans experiencing homelessness. According to a study released last year by Disabled American Veterans, women who are veterans are two to four times as likely to experience homelessness than women who are not veterans. While only 0.9 percent of homeless adults are women, 8 percent of homeless veterans are women – about 4,500 nationally. With more women enlisting in the military, more women are becoming homeless after returning to civilian life. According to the report, “African American women veterans, ages 18-29, who live in poverty, were shown to be particularly susceptible to becoming homeless, with 36.3 percent experiencing homelessness compared to 11.9 percent of all other women veterans in poverty.”
Nancy Sloan, the women’s programs manager at the Portland VA, says many women join the military because they see it as a means to acquire a career, housing and stability. But when they return from deployment, she says, “they have trouble reintegrating and feeling like they’re the same person that they were when they left.” She says their friends and family have a hard time understanding what they saw. “That was a lot of trauma and experiences that many will never see in their lifetime, “ she says, “to come back and just pick up where they left off is next to impossible. On top of that trying to go to school, go back to mothering their children, trying to find work, all of that is a huge, huge challenge.”
McDowell says by the time women contact her, “They are so stressed out they can’t focus on what to do next.” It can be hard for many of them to get the services they need if they decided to wait until after they were discharged to speak up about sexual assault or trauma from combat, she says. “It’s really important that the person filling out their claim is the right person.” In most of the cases she’s come across, the women were living out of their cars, in some cases with their children.
“Pride has a lot to do with it. They’d rather sleep in their car than in a shelter where there’s no common law and it’s hard to keep the males separate from the females,” says McDowell.
