What is wrong with this picture?
Whenever single homeless women stay in and seek help from homeless shelters, they end up being treated like teenagers who need to be disciplined, or worse, they are treated like animals that need to be kept in cages until it is time for them to be let out so they can do their business, which in this case, means to search for work or for housing, or to obtain disability, or to simply get out of the building and off the premises – including the surrounding premise area until it is time to be let back into their cage like room at the shelter.
If this isn’t bad enough, in some homeless shelters, single women are put in large dorms with up to ninety or more other single women – most of whom doesn’t know how to behave themselves and must share one large bathroom, while in other homeless shelters, single women are placed in rooms with four up to eight other single women or in an apartment along with eight to ten other single women and must sleep on bunkbeds built for kids or teenagers or on cots.
To make things worse, if single women are in homeless shelters where there are families or single mothers with children and single men, their needs are put on the back burner while the other needs are dealt with first.
While families, single mothers with children and single men get sympathy, single women do not. Truth is, single women get the third degree and are severely mistreated. Single women are horribly critized or treated either like lazy bums or criminals just because they are homeless.
Now in some cases, single women being homeless due to alcoholism or drug use, but this is not the case for everyone. Not even close. For in a lot of cases, single women are homeless because of family tragedies or loss of job and home or forced to live in a situation where homelessness is the normal outcome. For example: being forced to find a job in a neighborhood where one CANNOT speak the same language as the locals. Nor is that person offered any new language speaking lessons as part of a hiring process.
Although homeless shelters do have programs residents can enroll in and stay there for free, those programs come at a high price. In fact, just staying in a homeless shelter comes at a high price and it’s not money talking either.
Reason being, staying at a homeless shelter means one has to obey the shelter’s rules or risk getting kicked out. Nearly every homeless shelter, all Residents are required to attend chapel seven days a week. In some shelters, it is twice a day while in other shelters, it is only once a day.
While this is okay. There is nothing against people having chapel. However, it is not a okay to continuously shove the gospel down every Resident’s throat and/or using not attending chapel as a weapon against Residents.
Then there is their Work To Stay programs where Residents can stay for free if the Resident is willing to work long hours and often strenuous work just to have a place to sleep at night.
Judy Kaye 2 