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# Homeless women are the victims of power, greed
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/how-to-deal-with-hassles-of-the-probate-process/
- Published: 2003-04-14T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T02:04:28.000Z
- Author: David Pisarra
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import, Homeless, Homelessness

*By Charles Springer*

The other night I was in my sleeping spot doing some drawing and a procession of about five homeless women walked by, shopping carts in toe like a wagon train.

I started to wonder what this country is coming to in allowing women to be homeless. Women on the streets are more vulnerable to the dangers of the streets than a man.

I started to think about my own mother and even though we are not on speaking terms, I would not want to see my mother homeless. Nor my sisters, my ex-wife or daughters.

It is a real shame that women, who are the givers of life, should even be subjected to this environment. I feel very bad whenever I see a homeless woman.

We should do as much as we can to keep women safe. Being a homeless woman, I would imagine, is more difficult than being a man on the streets. Woman have very different needs than men and though I am far from a chauvinist, I feel that they are the weaker of the two sexes physically.

Being a woman on the streets is very dangerous. Just recently there was a woman found dead on the bluffs. She was naked from the waist down which indicated that rape might have been involved in her demise. Rape is a very real danger for women out here and because of the treatment of homeless as being not worthy, some rapes often go unreported.

This is what our country has become in the past so many years — the very people who gave all of us life, are living on the streets. We as a nation should be ashamed to even know that this is happening to some women in this country. We should be angry and embarrassed before the world.

How much different is letting a woman be homeless in America than the way women are treated in Afghanistan under the Taliban or in Iraq under Saddam’s regime? What is the difference if a woman is treated like a second-class citizen in these countries or being allowed to be homeless here in the richest country in the world?

We, as a whole, should be asking ourselves that question and finding what the differences are between this country and other countries that we condemn for this type of treatment of women. We should be assessing the way we treat our own citizens and not looking to someone else’s backyard at the feces that they have piled up in human right abuses and the abuse of women, when we are not treating our own right.

Just think of the respect we would have if we managed to stop homelessness and hunger in our own country. How do we treat our own citizens right? How many countries do you think would come to us for help if we got our collective act together? If we do what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan we would be respected as a leader in the world instead of the bully of the world. If we did not look down on homelessness as a sociological blight and start seeing that its causes are due to greed and power that a few wield wrongfully, then we would become truly the enlightened country we pretend to be. And not a society of hypocrites as we have become in the world’s view.

So next time you see a homeless woman, think about how you would feel if it was your grandmother, mother, sister, daughter, or wife who is sleeping on the cold concrete. Maybe your view would change if you weren’t so desensitized to this issue and started to speak up about this to the powers that be to stop giving aid to other countries and start taking care of our own people who are suffering. Maybe you’ll see a difference. (Charles Springer is a homeless freelance writer and artist living, working and going to school from the streets of Santa Monica.)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 14, 2003.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/041403.pdf?ref=smdp.com)