Down for the Count: Women Veterans Likely Underestimated in Federal Homelessness Figures [HuffingtonPost.com]

“Homeless women are something of a sociological mystery,” wrote University of Virginia social scientist Ted Caplow, Ph.D. While he wasn’t talking about homeless women veterans, he might as well have been.

As a phenomenon, they manage to be starkly invisible — rarely included in discussions about homeless veterans as a whole, ignored in the popular media and under-researched in the academic literature. Further adding to their marginalized status is the fact it seems almost impossible to come up with a reasonably accurate count of how many homeless women veterans there actually are. For that count, the federal government relies on several notoriously imprecise methods that are particularly inaccurate when attempting to estimate this population, because of behaviors and preferences that leave them largely uncounted. Yet being accurately represented in annual federal estimates is essential for homeless women veterans — because everything from funding to resources to services that address this unique population depends on it. Being undercounted — or uncounted — perpetuates the very invisibility of these women, the fastest growing segment of homeless veterans today.