Street roots
Nov. 9, 2012
P H O T O B Y C H R IS T O P H E R O N S T O T T
M aggie Lorenz-Todd looks o u t fro m the bedroom o f her P o rtland home. “We’re going to do everything and anything we can to not be outside at night. I t’s survival.”
Portland advocates fo r the homeless and women’s rights join forces to tackle sexual assault on the streets
B Y A L E X Z IE L IN S K I
S T A F F W R IT E R
hen DeWanna Harris first walked
through the doors of Transition
Projects five years ago, she was at
the end of her rope.
“I was so, so tired of life just tearing me
up,” Harris, a Portland native, says.
Harris, who had been hopping between
West Coast cities for a year, homeless and
dealing with a sexually abusive partner, had
finally found her way back to her hometown.
And she was ready for a change.
The shelter assisted Harris with finding a
home, a job and other social support, but at
the time it lacked a service that had been
overlooked nationally in homeless shelters
for decades: sexual abuse screening.
“It makes sense. The first thing shelters
want to do is get you housed and sober.
Counseling wasn’t a priority,” says Harris,
who now is a mentor at Transition Projects,
says. “I didn’t even realize how affected I
was by my abuse at the time.”
Although it’s a national problem— and
perhaps a leading trigger of homelessness —
sexual abuse in the homeless community is
a topic most have avoided tackling because
of its complexity and financial hurdles. Until
now.
W
fter watching a constant stream of
exually abused homeless clients come
th ro u g h T ran sitio n P ro je cts, D ire c to r
sexual a b u se and how it can be cu rb ed .
Doreen Binder is making the issue a
priority, both nationally and locally.
“Over the years of working in both
women’s and homeless shelters, I’ve*
realized that there is a constant thread that
runs through both communities,” Binder
says. “That core issue is sexual assault. And
it’s been ignored.”
Binder says it’s not the victim’s
responsibility to speak up, but society’s.
“Many homeless people use sexual
encounters to save themselves, whether it
be for money or for mere warmth,” she
says. “And in most cases, it’s not what
they’d want to be doing if they weren’t
homeless. They don’t have the choice.”
So, when victims reach a homeless
shelter, many don’t bring up their past
sexual encounters. To some, it may simply
seem part of living on the streets, and
something to forget.
For three years, Binder, along with Jessie
Mindlin, a friend and director of training at
the Victim Rights Law Center, has been
working to combat Multnomah County’s
lack of attention to sexual abuse issues in
the homeless sphere — a first-of-its-kind
project.
Their approach is to create training
videos for homeless shelter employees
nationwide on immediately screening
individuals for sexual abuse. This pre
admittance screening step could unveil an
array of vital information on what causes
“We’re addressing this more openly than
we ever have before,” Binder says. “It’s time
to bring this invisible war out in the open.”
Although the pair’s efforts will shine a
needed light on the problem, why has it
taken so long to get to this point?
JESUIT
here certainly isn’t a lack of need to
intervene to help victims. According to
a National Alliance to End Homelessness
study, “State of Homelessness in America
2012,” 637,017 people experienced
homelessness in 2011, with 17,254 in
Oregon alone. A 2003 case study of the
homeless population in San Francisco found
an average of 32.5 percent of homeless
people to be victims of physical or sexual
assault. Additionally, a 2010 National
Conference of State Legislatures fact sheet
showed that 17 percent of all homeless
youth were victims of sexual abuse at home.
Portlander Maggie Lorenz-Todd’s rocky
journey through homelessness and
prostitution echoes these numbers. At age
11, Lorenz-Todd ran away from her
California home after being raped, an
incident her single mother refused to
believe. Within months, Lorenz-Todd was
working as a prostitute for abusive pimps;
she was addicted to an array of drugs and
regularly tossed in and out of juvenile hall.
T
See SEX, LIES, page 4
Street Roots is a proud
partner with Jesuit
Volunteer Corps Northwest
and Americorps.
NORTHW EST