Today, homelessness in the United States is an overwhelmingly male problem. Approximately 9 out 10, or about 205,000 unsheltered homeless people on any given night in America will be men or boys, while women, who represent about 36% of those without a permanent residence, constitute only 10% of the unsheltered. This disproportionate disparity between the sexes is disturbing both because of how little attention this fact receives within society, but also because its tells a grim story that runs parallel, and in many ways is is a direct result of, several other difficult problems men face today.
Scope of Reasons
There are many reason someone finds themselves in a situation where they become homeless. While these reasons are quiet important, such as mental illness, unemployment, physical disability or substance abuse, the scope of this article is to examine why men have fewer emergency assistance options, and what lead to this large disparity between the sexes.
Homeless Basics
In order to explore this issue throughly, we need to take a look at some of the terminology in regards to homelessness. There are two basic categories of homeless; those who are sheltered, by either a private or religious organization or through public assistance of some form, and those who are unsheltered, which are those literally living in areas not fit for human habitation (ie cars, abandoned dwellings etc) or those who we are more accused to encounter, that sleep on park benches, underpasses or heating grates. In addition to sheltered and unsheltered, there are three types of homeless people;
*
Chronic - Those who remain without a residence for over 180 days, and usually experience multiple periods of extended homelessness throughout their lives
*
Transitional - Homeless by a variety of temporary circumstances, and are in a shelter or receive other assistance less than 180 days
*
Publicly assisted long term residents - Technically not homeless, however it represents those families or individuals who spend long periods of time, usually years, in publicly funded or subsidized housing. In the US they number over 1.5 million adults and children. The overwhelming majority of this number are single parent adult women with children
Statistics 101
These facts can be found through several studies done by different organizations. The
US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) annual report is the base line for these statistics.
643,047 people in the US will be homeless on any given night (does not include long term assisted)
403,308 of these are sheltered
239,759 of these are unsheltered (this number is estimated to be higher due to the difficulty of tracking unsheltered homeless)
83% of the unsheltered homeless are adult men
7% of the unsheltered homeless are boys under the age of 18
10% of the unsheltered homeless are adult women and girls under the age of 18. The CDC and HHS estimates almost half this number are "runaway" teenage girls.
edit: As a reader pointed out to me, and which is something that I already knew, is that this HHS study among others are Point in Time (PIT) statistics. This means they ran these figures, as they almost always do on a January night, when many northern US cities have
"out of the cold" programs, which reduces the number of unsheltered homeless by almost 1/2. Furthermore, as you will find in these studies, it is difficult to ascertain gender ratio's for unsheltered that can be correlated back to other studies easily. The much more brutal truth is that on an average night in the US, the number of unsheltered homeless is almost double, perhaps more, than the 240,000 figure. Furthermore, the data indicates, taking into account all nights during the year, that men and boys actually account for 94-97% of the unsheltered homeless; or 9.4 to 9.7 out 10 unsheltered homeless on an average night are men. I went with the conservative figures, which in themselves are devastating, as no one can really challenge their validity in any meaningful way.
A closer data point in reality for an average night in the US would be closer to 400, 000 men or 95.8% of the total of the unsheltered homeless. This is data I am still working on confirmation on through more than just one study.
404,957 are individuals
238,110 are persons in families*
142,000 or 60% of homeless families are children
71% of sheltered individuals were adult men
25% of sheltered individuals were adult women
80% of sheltered homeless families include adult women and 20% include adult men. (Most of them include adult men who are part of a two parent homeless family)
Almost all of the publicly assisted long term residents that are single parent families are headed by adult women
General Characteristics of Homeless Men
1 in 10 are Veterans
4 in 10 has some sort of disability, including mental illness
75% are over the age of 30, most are older than 40
Race- 42% African-American, 38% white, 20% Hispanic
1 in 17 men living in poverty will access an emergency homeless shelter each year, compared to 1 in 35 women living in poverty (1)
Discussions about homelessness and gender
One of the ironic problems that I have encountered while discussing this issues with many different people, when faced with the facts about unsheltered homeless men, inevitably someone will say or try to argue "but men make up about 65% of the total homeless population." The problem with this view, as we will explore later, is that this 65% includes individuals and families with access to public assistance and housing shelters, including the long term projects. Individual men almost always fail to met the requirements for almost all public assistance, (with the exception of Medicaid and Social Security programs) especially those that are meant to benefit children but have the side benefit of helping the parent. The brutal kinds of homelessness, whether it be an overcrowded shelter or more importantly the unsheltered, those literally living on the street is far and away a men's problem. The big glaring issue, is that society has provided with public funds, many layers of safety nets for women, but almost none for men.
Indeed, Health and Human Services (HHS), the governmental agency tasked with managing most of these programs has openly admitted the some of the reasons there is a huge disparity between homeless men and women. Their 2009 annual report states:
"Single men who are poor may be more vulnerable to homelessness because of large gaps in the Unemployment Insurance program and because the largest safety net programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Social Security, are for families or elderly people. The share of unemployed workers receiving unemployment insurance has declined in recent decades and the gap may be particularly perilous for men because poor women are likely to be accompanied by children and thus eligible for TANF. Adult poor men also have higher rates of substance abuse than women, but substance abuse has not been a categorical eligibility criterion for SSI since 1996. Thus, some women may fall through one social safety net but be caught by another; men may miss them all."
Children, Custody Battles and the Effect on Men
Our court systems have to this day still have not caught up with the radical social transformations of the later 20th century, and in many ways still operates under the 18th century ideas of women as the primary care givers and men as the primary providers and protectors. As divorce rates began to skyrocket during the 1970's, the courts appeared both overwhelmed and paralyzed on what to do in light of these changes, and still to this day have not made a concerted effort on the national level to transform the polices governing child custody and support to fit these new social roles. What people remember as the Women's liberation movement, or early feminism, took good advantage of this anachronistic judicial system to lobby on one hand for the courts to enforce these old gender roles, and on the other to propel women as independent and liberated from these exact same gender roles. The consequences for fathers have been devastating. Even though the rates for single parent families lead by men is rising, 11.3 million single parent families are still lead by females versus about 2.8 million single parent families headed by males. Although this trend is slowly changing, fathers within broken families have been systematically removed from much of the family equation.
The National Organization for Women along side several other feminist organizations fought hard and won protection for women, via proxy of the children the courts awarded to them as custody. And despite having just about 500,000 members, NOW wield tremendous political clout within the US, which has given them the ability to influence much of this legislation. Dozens of these laws and programs, which NOW and other groups lobbied for and supported, have been enacted to socially underwrite, and hence guarantee the basic necessities of women through these court mandated gender roles. In essence, in the absence of fathers to provide either direct support via being part of the "nuclear family" or in lieu of court ordered payments of child support, feminists have been able to influence lawmakers to enforce these ridged gender roles they outwardly oppose, by having the government, or better yet, society become the surrogate provider and protector for disadvantaged women. 79% of sheltered families, and an even greater number in long term subsidized housing, which are not considered homeless by HHS or NIH, are female lead. Indeed, no sane person would argue that society shouldn't look after children in poverty, as of course kids deserve all the benefits they need to grow up healthy and educated. However, NOW has almost always defended the mother's right to custody over the father, even going to the point of calling
Father's Rights Groups as fringe and extremists.
1974 Title IV-D of the Social Security Act aka Child Support Enforcement Program
NOW’s leadership deemed 1973 as “NOW’s Action Year Against Poverty,”(7) and led many campaigns that year to enact programs dedicated to women in regards to poverty, health care and child support. While much of what they lobbied Congress for died that year, they were able to call Title IV-D of the Social Security Act as a victory. What came out of that act was the
Child Support Enforcement Program. Under the bill, the then Dept of Health Education and Welfare, known today as Health and Human Services, created the Office of Child Support Enforcement(OCSE), which is dedicated to funding programs to track down parents who are behind on their support payments.
In FY 2007 alone, OCSE spent 2.7 billion dollars to help states maintain their own CSE divisions,
and enacted many now maligned practices, (9) such as reporting delinquent parents to credit bureaus, suspending drivers, professional, occupational and recreational licenses and in some cases press criminal charges. Obviously, due to the antiquated custody laws, this bill and subsequent programs were and continue to be aimed almost exclusively at men. The effect it had on men was when a man lost his job, or couldn't find employment quickly, a big hole of arrears of child support would be created, which too often became a hole they could never recover from. Despite taking into consideration circumstances that would cause payment delinquency, politicians and officials inside OCSE showed little mercy towards fathers.
Federally Funded Programs for Women and Families
Welfare had always been a program rife with abuse, bad press and astronomical costs. In 1996-97, President Bill Clinton pushed an initiative to replace the 1935 law Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with someone that requires more responsibility on the recipients, and less waste of money overall. What was born was the
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act (TANF), a $7 billion dollar project that placed emphasis on families, and moving them to self dependancy over a period of time. Again, TANF with almost all the other programs targeted families, which because of our still antiquated court system and custody laws, overwhelmingly favored single parent mothers. Today, this benefit is extended to around 4.3 million Americans.
But Congress wasn't finished yet, and continued to enact additional grant based programs for families and youths under the purview of HHS. While again, no one is question the importance of children to receive food, shelter and the basic necessities, an enormous disparity between women and men exists as to who benefits in conjunction with the child/children. Pregnant women or women with young children have even more programs funded to supply medical services, food and education.
The more prominent ones are:
Community Services Block Grant
Social Services Block Grant
Transitional Living Program for Older Homeless Youth
Head Start
WIC
Maternal and Child Health Services Block Grant (Offers over a dozen smaller programs)
SNAP
HUD Programs
The Decoy of Domestic Violence
For the past 25 years the portrayal of domestic violence within most media, TV, movie and magazines, and moreover, the general public, has been one of exclusive male on female violence. This attitude has become so ingrained in our society as truth, without a close look at real statistics, that extreme measures have been taken to attempt to curb this perceived epidemic of male violence. The problem is, none of these portrayals of
domestic abuse are even remotely correct. Studies done by both public and private institutions, including the CDC, DOJ, HHS, the American Journal of Public Health and Family Court Review have shown a very different reality of violence inside the home. For many years now, we have known that women are at least as likely as men to engage in partner aggression.(10) "In at least half of all cases, partner violence is mutual."(11)
Another CDC study showed that one way physical aggression is perpetrated by the female in about 70% of the cases. Furthermore, acts of child abuse or neglect are committed by the mother in about 40% of cases, 18% by the father and the rest of the time, 52% by either both parents, non-family members or step-parent/partner and parent.(12)
What is true, for reasons beyond the scope of this article, is that men almost never report incidents of domestic violence where they have been the victim. It is also true, when violence escalates, that women are more likely to be injured 62%, while the men are injured about 38% of the time. In incidents where the police are called, the
men are much more likely to be arrested for domestic violence when both parties were equal aggressors, especially in states that have a mandatory arrest policy. Not only are men the victims of domestic violence many times more often than has been portrayed, but men are also much more likely to be accused and arrested for domestic violence than their female partners.
In 1994, Congress passed and President Clinton signed Violence Against Women's Act, which was sponsored by now US Vice President Joe Biden. The bill was a high priority within groups such as NOW, National Coalition Against Sexual Assault, National Women’s Political Caucus, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and several others. NOW President Patricia Ireland,
made a statement in 1996 where she likened VAWA to the civil rights act of 1964, saying domestic violence is a hate crime and ironically mentioned the significance of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Under the law clause.
The net affect was the Office on Violence Against Women in the U.S. Department of Justice was established in 1995, along with about 20 different programs and hundreds of millions of dollars oh new grant money to administer. Much of this money was allocated to finding housing and basic needs for both just women, and both women and children. A list of
VAWA created programs from DoJ's website:
Campus Grant Program
Children and Youth Exposed to Violence Grant Program
Court Training and Improvements Program
Culturally and Linguistically Specific Services for Victims Program
Education, Training and Enhanced Services to End Violence Against and Abuse of Women with Disabilities
Engaging Men
Services, Training, Education and Policies to Reduce Domestic Violence, Dating Violence, Sexual Assault and Stalking in Secondary Schools Grant Program (STEP)
Tribal SASP
Sexual Assault Service Program-Cultural
Enhanced Training and Services to End Violence and Abuse of Women Later in Life Program
Grants to Encourage Arrest Policies and Enforcement of Protection Orders
Grants to Indian Tribal Governments Program
Grants to Tribal Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Coalitions
Legal Assistance for Victims Grant Program
Rural Grant Program
Safe Havens: Supervised Visitation and Safe Exchange Grant Program
Services to Advocate for and Respond to Youth Grant Program
Sexual Assault Services Program
State Coalitions Grant Program
STOP (Services, Training, Officers, and Prosecutors) Violence Against Women Formula Grants to States
Transitional Housing Grant Program
VAWA truly became a cornucopia of federal money along with political capital for NOW to sell the nation on their version of domestic violence; male offender/ female victim. It also created a lucrative federal cash flow for the specific use of housing, education, college campus programs and other gender specific programs. In many ways VAWA was a homerun for NOW, giving them a strong social safety net to which single women and single women with children have in the event of a housing emergency, or even a long term poverty issue. While the law was later tweaked to favor a more gender-neutral wording, the emphasis has always been on women, while those rare men who have come forward to report to being battered aren't given the same treatment, nor access to the same programs.
Originally passed in 1984, but then renamed and passed as a modified bill was the
Family Violence Prevention and Services Grant Act which grants some 250 million a year of Federal funds to support around 2,000 privately owned domestic shelters. Almost without exception, as these shelters opened up and received funds, they have become exclusive for women and children, and at best, a battered man could receive a hotel voucher for a weeks stay at a local hotel and perhaps specialized and segregated counseling. From
NOW's current push to reenact this bill: "Unless Congress reauthorizes FVPSA, over 2,000 shelters in the U.S. and millions of women and children could be left without funding or assistance. With domestic violence affecting so many women and children, NOW activists must demand that Congress pass the FVPSA reauthorization (H.R. 4116)"
The net result of these programs, which do include others not specified here, is a publicly funded safety net layer for women, at the expense and exclusion of men. Men are de facto excluded from the lion's share of these funds and shelters.
Specialized Federal Programs on Women's Health and Poverty
Although it is well known that men have a life expectancy 5-7 years earlier than women, several federal programs have been set up over the past 10 years, dedicated towards health and poverty issues geared for women only. These programs have many grants that directly benefit health care issues that women in poverty have. The National Institutes of Health(NIH) has established
The Office of Research on Women's Health but have no such office or resources dedicated to men's health outside of a "topic link" to a generic page about men's health. The Veterans Administration also has a the '
Specialized Programs for Women Veterans' which "
awarded grants to eight community-based homeless veteran service providers to support programs designed specifically for women veterans," which also includes items on women's health, though no equivalent program at VA exists for men. HHS has an
Office on Women's Health which offers programs, advice, research and links to sites like
Women and the Affordable Care Act.
Invisibility of Men and More of the Same
The book, Anthropological locations: boundaries and grounds of a field science By Akhil Gupta, James Ferguson, talks about this problem(p.159):
Several stories (
this one article suggests a link between sexual assault and female homelessness) regarding an increase in the
rise of homeless female vets hit several
media outlets this past couple of months. Indeed, Michelle Obama took notice as well, and
championed a female veterans only housing project in NC. In January of this year even CNN did a special report on female homelessness that they called
'Homeless women face more obstacles'.
In the piece, Roseanna Means, founder of Women of Means told CNN:
"There are so many things that women have to deal with more so than men do -- reproductive years, and then mammograms, then menopause. A lot of women's health is preventive care, and if women lose out on those screening tests, their lives are in danger.
In the world of homelessness, there are lots of emotional issues, psychiatric issues, women who have been beaten up so many times they can't connect the dots. They don't have an address. They don't have a phone. They're all sitting in a shelter together, but they're not necessarily friends. There's not a common bond of, "We're all in this together." Everybody is struggling. Everybody's isolated. Everybody's miserable"
Even though men are much more likely to be unsheltered than females and go through many of the same kinds of problems as these, but 10 fold, this attitude that when men are homeless and mire in abject poverty no one notices, but when women start to show a rise, it becomes an urgent crisis. It is more than abundantly clear that feminist organizations, and even society in general view men suffering as less than as important than women. Indeed, we have so many programs and public funds that go towards women, that this invisibility and disposability of men is written in law.
Only passing mention in any of these media stories mentioned the enormous disparity between the amount of homeless men and women. Indeed, one story quoted male homelessness as a matter of fact:
"Years ago, homeless veterans were almost exclusively men. But with new wars and a changing Army, young women in their mid-20s to early 30s are encompassing a larger part of the homeless population, especially in Fayetteville."
A website called change.org recently ran an article titled '
Poor Women Underserved by Government Anti-Poverty Programs.' They write:
"As Kathryn Baer writes over at Poverty in America, the one possible positive outcome from this report could be that we finally start reevaluating our safety net programs. It isn't enough to talk about women's rights. The government needs to step up and fix these failing programs that so many women and children desperately need."
In an all too familiar tone, the Denver Post wrote a 2009 Op Ed entitled
'Too many single, homeless women left out in the cold':
"Denver streets are no place to spend the night when the mercury drops below zero, but several single, homeless women faced just such a challenge this week due to a shortage of shelter beds. Even though the number of women affected is small, it's an appalling reality and ought to be a call to arms."
They continue:
"We can't always expect government to be the safety net, especially in dire economic times. And we can't assume there are enough people volunteering at shelters and donating the money and resources required to fill the need."
But 30 years of men sleeping on the streets wasn't a call to arms? The appalling reality is that men's suffering is seen as less important that women's suffering.
Why are men an afterthought when it comes to destroying poverty? So every time I hear someone laugh off Men's Right's voices about all these overwhelming problems men face with "What about teh menz?" it really enforces that the National Organization of Women, for the past 30 years, wasn't ever truly about equal protection under the law.
Conclusions
200,000 men sleep on the street tonight because much of society has forgotten about them. Feminist organizations who used their political influence to garner multiple safety nets for women, at the expense of men, certainly don't care. Since it isn't a glamorous topic, most politicians tend to only worry about helping those people who will make them look good. The thing is, they are more than just a dirty bum living inside those cardboard boxes, or sleeping on park benches, they are sons, fathers, grandfathers and brothers. Simply put, they are human beings, and deserve a voice in the discussion when our society begins to dole out money to combat homelessness. The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution demands equal protection under the law. What Congress has done over the past 30 years spits in the face of equality.
With men and boys falling behind in education and unemployment, this problem is bound to get worse. We need a voice for men in poverty, we need a voice that can stand up to Congress, we need an strong and unified organization that is willing to tackle these issues. It is more than abundantly clear if we don't speak out and work towards solving problems such as male homelessness, no body will.
References and further reading
(1)
http://www.societaldistress.org/files/HO-HAR2009.pdf
(2)
http://www.societyandculture.com/Runaway_Children
(3)
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/socy/vanneman/socy498/gendertype.html
(4)
http://www.nchv.org/women.cfm
(5)
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/socy/vanneman/socy498/genderformer.html
(6)
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/who.html
(7)
http://www.hhh.umn.edu/centers/wpp/flf/pdf/welfare_case.pdf
(8)
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cse/
(9)
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/opa/fact_sheets/cse_factsheet.html
(10)
http://www.saveservices.org/downloads/Myths-of-ABA-Commission-on-DV-Summary
(11)
http://smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdf
(12)
http://www.nij.gov/publications/dv-dual-arrest-222679/ch1/findings.htm
(13)
http://www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/2011/08/women.html
(14)
http://www.change.org/petitions/support-the-reauthorization-of-family-violence-prevention-and-services-act
(15)
http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/5996/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=2207
(16)
http://www.saveservices.org/reports/
(17) http://www.now.org/press/07-96/07-29b96.html
(18) http://www.centerwomenpolicy.org/programs/poverty/
(19) http://www.womenshealth.gov/
(20) http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/poverty/welfare-to-work.aspx
(21) http://www.allaboutcounseling.com/domestic_violence.htm
(22) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL30442.pdf
(23) http://now.org/issues/economic/welfare/TANFtestimonySept2011.pdf
(24) http://singleparents.about.com/od/legalissues/p/portrait.htm
(25) http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/fysb/content/familyviolence/factsheet.htm
(26) http://www.endhomelessness.org/content/article/detail/3659
(27) http://www.societaldistress.org/Content.aspx?ID=29
(28)
Anthropological locations: boundaries and grounds of a field science
