Too bad you couldn't see the areas where me n Blurt live. Where Blurt lives probably no violence towards women or crime at all. Tho not as safe, Extreme violence of that kind is rare in Vancouver. You or your daughter would feel safe walking on the main streets here at night no weapons needed.
Joe, get your head out of the sand, will you? While the crime rate here is, indeed, lower than where you live, it doesn't mean the area is violence-free. The difficulty with violence against homeless women is that it's too often invisible (and thus under-reported). It's invisible because many of them are engaged in sex work in order to survive and they wish, for that very reason, to remain anonymous. I cannot tell you the number of times I've had to deal with abusive johns in situations where the woman absolutely refused to have the cops called in. Unless her injuries were life-treatening, I usually respected her wishes.
To Scouse's point above, being homeless is far riskier for women than it is for men because, while there are some male sex workers, women can too easily be sucked into a world where they need only peddle their bodies to get the cash needed for their next fix. It makes them highly vulnerable to sexual predators and, this, quite aside from the fact that they're usually of much smaller stature than the guys who use them and thus cannot defend themselves well in the event they're assaulted.
My focus with these women was never prayer or charity but prevention and easy access to goods and services that might make them less vulnerable. For instance, I always made sure they had instant access to condoms, feminine hygiene products, toilet paper, new pipes and syringes, Narcan kits, and shitloads of information about all the resources they could avail themselves of should they ever want to quit the streets--for whatever reason, without anyone ever inordinately pressuring them to do so. Dove has the right of it; you can't pull these women off the streets... they have to want to leave of their own accord.
One thing that was like a religion for me is that I made sure they had in their hands, within hours of its publication, the weekly "bad date sheet" put out by
, a local sex work safety group, in which incidents of violence against women perpetrated by unapprehended johns were listed, including their physical description, license plate numbers, and phone numbers (if available). Also, I tried, whenever possible, to put these homeless gals in contact with street workers from that same agency.
All this is mostly invisible to the suits running government programs or to Jane and John Q. Public rushing around the downtown core in the morning in their quest to grab a latte before heading to the office.
Doesn't mean it's not happening, yo!
