FEMALE AND HOMELESS

There are a lot of devastating life experiences that people go through but I think homelessness can be one of the most traumatic. unfortunately, there has been a steady rise for some time now. According to research by Shelter, a charity organization that helps people with housing needs, there are thirty-two thousand registered homeless people and at the time of rewriting this article, I couldn't verify the exact amount of homeless women in the UK. However, in 2017 about 14% of rough sleepers were women, they constitute a higher number of the hidden homeless who are less visible often sleeping in hostels, bed, and breakfast, or with friends. 

Being a homeless woman in the United Kingdom can be one of the most frightening and daunting experiences anyone could ever go through. It is estimated that over twenty percent of the homeless population are women and some studies have shown that they are at a much higher risk of being exploited and abused than men in the same situation.

Of course, I'm aware that men are highly affected by this as well but I want to concentrate particularly on young women. It is estimated that thirty-five percent of homeless people in the United Kingdom alone are young women and a number of them are sleeping or have slept rough on the street. So let me begin with my own experience. First of all,  I will start by saying that I never imagined something like this could ever happen to somebody like me.  I  always viewed it to be other people's problem. Somehow they were or have contributed to their own circumstance. 

You see I was of the thinking that things don't just happen,  nobody just becomes homeless and that somehow you must have contributed to it. However, my story was slightly different and perhaps a bit unique but in order not to bore you with some of the gory details,  I was basically deceived by a fraudulent tenant who took advantage of my gullibility and naivety in a nutshell. He sensed how trusting and desperate I was with my lack of questioning and easy-going attitude but in high sight, I should have been more thorough and asked better questions, I guess I was too exhausted from the search for a decent accommodation at the time.   

I am older now though and hopefully wiser but that wasn't the case then. I didn't understand the difference between renting and subletting a property for example  - please don't judge me, I just wasn't that wise at the time. S0 when I was asked to leave the property and   I realized what was really going on, it was simply too late.

This was even made more traumatic because I was only giving a couple of hours to leave with only half of my belongings, packed in black bags, and facing being on the street. 

I have heard of situations and circumstances much worse than mine and I know that people become homeless for all kinds of reasons, some of them through their own making but the majority of women that I came across at the time were not. women, in particular,  can find themselves in very vulnerable and dangerous situations and can often get themselves into even more desperate situations when facing these kinds of challenges.

Although I absolutely believed at the time that there was an ample amount of agencies willing to help and surely nobody would want to see a young woman on the street anyway, that wasn't the case at all. It was to become the hardest two and a half years of my life, I saw a side to society that I have never seen before.  A side of humanity that we would like to pretend does not exist,  seeing myself on what I have always believed to be the wrong side of life. Being solely reliant on the mercy and kindness of others. On a side, we all pray never to be on but yet claim to be passionate enough to eradicate for good. 

What I did observe though was the sexism across the agencies an unspoken negative attitude towards women in desperate positions with an urgent need for help. In my opinion, young women are initially viewed with suspicion and dealt with caution. There is an inherent opinion that every young woman who finds herself in that position must be in some way unstable or/ and incapable.  

They are seen to have contributed to their situation and a lot of the time that can be used against them. I think it will be fair to say that there is definitely a slack attitude in the system that allows women to be treated unfairly 

So I suggest  It is a time we reevaluate how we deal with vulnerable people, especially young women. I say this because I have had the unfortunate opportunity of witnessing some of the treatment that occurred to the most vulnerable women in our society whose needs were not seen as paramount and I can say that it is one of our tragic failures as a society.