Just look, and there they are. In cities and in towns, a growing number of rough sleepers are living through another British winter; some of them will die in it. In rain and sleet and wind and long hours of darkness, in doorways, under bridges, down alleys, on benches (where bars have not been added to prevent them), in makeshift tents (if these have not been removed by authorities), in sleeping bags, with dogs for protection and companionship, with others sometimes, but mostly alone and lonely, never private but usually ignored, they are in our blind sight.
What we often do not see are the female rough sleepers. That doesn’t mean they’re not there. Street counts estimating that women account for 15%-20% of the total are almost certainly an underestimation. Women are the hidden homeless. Because they are so at risk on the streets, vulnerable to all kinds of cruelty and abuse, they tend to conceal themselves.
They ride night buses; walk through the small hours; sleep in disused cars; have “survival sex”, such as sex work or sofa surfing in return for sex; find places they cannot be seen. During the wet, raw December afternoon I spent with two women from The Connection at St Martin’s, I was shown where to look: under that plastic sheeting, say, spread across a pile of rubbish. A woman lives in there; it’s her home.
Homelessness in England increased by 26% in 2022-23. In London, outreach teams recorded 4,068 people sleeping rough between July and September – a 12% increase on the same period last year: the highest quarterly rough-sleeping count since records began. Macro reasons – poverty, soaring rents, a lack of social housing or adequate welfare support for people at risk – interact with complex individual causes. One of the keyworkers I accompanied had herself lived rough. One bad decision, she said, and then, often with horrible rapidity and powerlessness, the journey into homelessness begins and it feels there is no way back. Doors clang shut.
It’s easier to blame the homeless, or feel self-righteous anger towards them, than to acknowledge the role of society, or our own luck, reliance on others and precariousness. There is a merciless tendency to think of homelessness as the person’s fault or weakness. It’s a few steps from this attitude to Suella Braverman’s “lifestyle choice”. But many of the long-term homeless, the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless says the majority of them, have experienced some kind of trauma: family breakdown, bereavement, abuse. Living on the street reinforces the trauma and the sense of the world’s indifference. It’s a vicious circle.
Female rough sleepers have frequently suffered from domestic abuse. Many have had their children taken from them. They escape to or are forced on to the street, where (wouldn’t you?) they often use drugs to dull their pain: spice, which is cheap; opiates or synthetic opiates. We step round them; we stare ahead, trying not to see. The average life expectancy of a woman sleeping rough in England and Wales is 41.
There are few women-only hostels. Because so many female rough sleepers have had distressing experiences of being housed, mixed hostels are often a threat, not a haven. They can be menacing environments: noisy and crowded, the risk of violence, including sexual violence, real. The street feels less hurtful and more private, and there, perhaps, other rough sleepers can offer what is sometimes the only real relationships they have known. It is horribly easy to become unhoused, difficult to make the journey back. For women who have lived rough for years, homelessness is embedded into their identity. To provide them with a place to live is not enough, because in that room they must confront themselves, come face to face with all they have done, seen, suffered, lost. That takes the kind of strength and courage few of us possess. However, it doesn’t have to be a one-way road.
The 18 Keys project (of which I am a committee member) will be a demonstration of this possibility and a flagship for humanity and change. Once all funds are in place, it will provide 18 female long-term rough sleepers with their own homes in a single-sex, beautifully designed building in south London, with a garden, communal space, 24-hour on-site staff, specialist support workers including therapists and career advisers, and their own key to their own door. The aim is to enable women with complex needs to live in a safe house that will also be a proper home.
For home means more than a roof over one’s head. It means shelter, bodily and emotional security, a bulwark against loss. It means a sense of belonging and return, a place to be alone or intimate with another, where we can love, and be unguarded and at our most vulnerable. To be homeless is not just to be without a roof, a bed, walls; it is to be naked to the world, an open wound.
Projects like the 18 Keys rely on the generosity of strangers; they show that with care, courage and hard work, those who have been lost for so long can at last find their way home.
Find out more about 18 Keys at 18keys.org
• Nicci Gerrard is a journalist, a novelist and a founder of John’s Campaign
