Female and homeless: fending off the drunks

Tuesday, 10 July 2018

What's it like to be female and sleeping rough?

Auckland Council has announced it will count the city's rough sleepers, to fully grasp its scale of homelessness here. We took to the streets to learn about the people on society's edge, whose current way of life the council hopes to eliminate.

Fending off the drunken pub-goers of south Auckland has been part of a Manurewa mother-of-three's nights for the past year.

She has no money for a taxi to take her home, and no home to go to even if she did: this woman with kind eyes and rotting teeth is a rough sleeper.

'It gets to the point where our street males have to fight to defend us,' she says, sitting outside the dairy where her posse spends its days hustling.

She doesn't want to be named – says she already feels vulnerable enough – but she does want people to know how scary it is for homeless females spending nights in the open.

* They fight, take drugs, and sleep rough: can the chronically homeless be saved?

* Homeless man living in South Auckland hotel costs taxpayers $2000 a week**

We will call her Alice and she is 29-years-old. Alice says there are about five women sleeping on the Manurewa streets at the moment, down from far more in the warmer months. A pregnant woman in her twenties was part of the crew until a week ago; 'she's gone home now,' says Alice. The majority of the others have been housed by LinkPeople, an organisation working to help the homeless, and Alice hopes she eventually will be too.

Alice ended up on the streets a year ago, when the aunt she'd been staying with died. Her children were already living with their dad's family, and, grieving for her aunt, Alice felt she had no other options.

After two weeks on the streets she discovered her uncle, 61-year-old Rimaati Kaipo, was also sleeping rough. Kaipo, who grew up in the Cook Islands, took his niece under his wing and Alice has become a camp mother figure in Kaipo's crew.

When someone drops off a bulk feed – it was KFC on Monday – Alice hollers. A dozen or so of her fellow rough sleepers amble over, and she makes sure everyone gets their fair share of chicken drumsticks.

There's a pretty big support network for the homeless in Manurewa; Kaipo and Alice reckon they're better off than those in downtown Auckland. A nearby church lets Alice stash her blankets inside during the day, a social worker rounds everyone up a few times a week to use the showers at the public swimming pool, and local individuals and businesses deliver regular meals.

Homeless women are especially vulnerable at night as drunks spill out from the pubs of south Auckland, says one of Manurewa's female rough sleepers.

'Us homeless at the South Mall are known for getting the best food in Auckland,' says Kaipo, though admits rampant synthetic cannabis usage is a problem.

Alice says having community support gives her 'a good, warm feeling that there's people behind us'.

That feeling evaporates at night: after the crew's guardian angels have gone to bed and as bars close, intoxicated men spill onto the streets to home in on women like Alice.

'They harass us, trying to take us into their car or back to their house,' she says.

'A couple of weeks ago there was this really drunk guy trying to take me and some of the other girls back to his motel room. He just didn't like the answer 'no'. And every time we'd say 'no', he'd get more aggressive.'

Older male rough sleepers, such as Rimaati Kaipo, take on a bodyguard role for the women in their group.

The women tried moving, but the man followed them.

'In the end I had no choice but to go and wake my uncle up, to tell him what's going on,' Alice says.

'It ended up in a big fist fight.

Shaken by the experience, she says she spent most of the following three days 'just crying under my blanket'.

'We can't always defend ourselves … something really bad might happen – they might be bigger than me and able to drag me around the back, or into their car.

'It's really scary out there at night. It really is. And it's just lucky that we've got the rest of our street family, which is our older males, to look after us.'

EASY SEXUAL TARGETS

While chronic homelessness tends to affect men more, as women tend to have more luck seeking support from family, LinkPeople prioritises females for housing, says social worker Leonie Kaipo.

'Their gender is absolutely an extra vulnerability,' she says. They are both physically and emotionally vulnerable, the latter due to the low self esteem many homeless women suffer due to past and present domestic abuse.

The social worker says rough sleeping females get seen as easy sexual targets.

'We hear it a lot, stories they've been preyed on the night before,' she says.

'Rape's not something that comes up when we're speaking with them on the streets, but I imagine it would be an issue. Often trauma doesn't surface until months down the track after they've been housed.'

'ONE DAY I HOPE I'LL GET ALL MY KIDS BACK'

It's photos of her three children, aged 11, five, and four, that keep Alice upbeat. Their paternal grandmother brings the kids to a Manurewa McDonald's every fortnight to spend time with their mum.

'My kids know I'm out on the streets – I don't hide anything from them,' she says.

'Once I get housed I can start looking at getting my kids for the weekend, and one day I hope I'll get all my kids back.

'They're why I'll never give up.'