WUNRN
USA - LOS ANGELES - HOMELESS WOMEN -
STUDY OF DOWNTOWN WOMEN'S NEEDS
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Report:
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HALF THE HOMELESS WOMEN SURVEYED IN ONE OF POOREST AREAS OF DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES, HAVE BEEN SEXUALLY ASSAULTED
By Jeanne Kuang - August 9, 2014
Homeless women on downtown Los Angeles' skid row
are increasingly older and racial minorities, a report released this week
found, and half of homeless women have experienced sexual assault.
The Downtown Women's Action Coalition, a group aiming to improve women's housing and other services, surveyed 324 women in the Skid Row area in 2013 for the fifth Downtown Women's Needs Assessment.
The
coalition also proposed solutions to homelessness and related problems,
including an expansion in affordable and permanent supportive housing,
increased local women's health services, community interventions to prevent
sexual violence, training and employment programs and decriminalization of
homelessness.
The DWAC found half the women surveyed were 51 or older, an increase from the 2010 survey when that number was 47 percent.
About
20 percent of older women on Skid Row said they had been homeless for less than
a year, the report said, indicating "the continual arrival of newly
homeless older women, who have lost housing as a result of the death of a
spouse or estrangement from adult children."
Older women also reported having poorer physical and mental health than younger women.
The
report found many women were victims of sexual abuse, which the World Health
Organization has said makes people more likely to have Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder and to abuse alcohol or drugs.
Forty percent of women surveyed said they had
been victims of child abuse, 50 percent said they were victims of sexual
assault and about 60 percent said they had experienced domestic violence.
Nearly a quarter of respondents had experienced
all three, and about 14 percent said they had been sexually assaulted in the
past year.
Systemic racial discrimination accounts for an
increase in minority women who are homeless on Skid Row, according to the
report.
About 58 percent of the women were African
American, up from 53 percent in 2010.
"Over time, discrimination in education, housing access, and wages and employment opportunities leave these groups more vulnerable to poverty and homelessness," the DWAC said the report.
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