A thousand volunteers walked the streets of Montreal on Tuesday evening as part of Operation Everyone Counts, a large count of homeless people, the first since the pandemic. Although necessary, this exercise remains incomplete, since it only measures “visible” homelessness, which excludes most women.
“Women, even those who are homeless, do everything to avoid being on the streets. In general, they find a place somewhere”, explains Léonie Couture, founder and general manager of La rue des Femmes, a place of accommodation and a “relational health center” for women “in a state of homelessness or at risk. to sink there” in the Centre-Sud district of Montreal.
In 2019, when announcing the results of the previous year’s count — the last to date — then Minister of Health and Human Services Danielle McCann said that men made up nearly three quarters of the people counted. Aboriginal peoples — the Inuit in particular — and homosexual or bisexual people were also overrepresented.
“Our accommodation resource for homeless women is also full to capacity, every month of the year. We refuse approximately 7,000 accommodation requests each year. Despite this, women will be underrepresented in the next count,” wrote the management of Auberge Madeleine, a shelter for homeless women in Greater Montreal, on Twitter.
“It’s always a tragedy for a woman to spend the night outside. Any woman alone at night doesn’t feel safe. Those who find themselves in the street are all the more at risk of aggression, ”said Léonie Couture.
According to her, who has worked in the community sector for decades, women are no less at risk when they take refuge elsewhere than in the street: “They take refuge in abandoned warehouses, for example, in dangerous corners count does not reach, even in other men, who will ask them for sexual services. »
This is why most homeless women mainly experience so-called “hidden” homelessness, outside of front-line or street resources.
Consider “hidden” homelessness?
“It is certain that the count serves above all to take the pulse of ‘visible’ homelessness. The Ministry of Health oversees other programs, for other types of situations,” says Caroline Dusablon, assistant director of urban partnerships, of the CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l’Île-de-Montréal, head of the count at Montreal.
Moreover, although the operation in Montreal remains the most ambitious in Quebec, thirteen other regions of the province are involved in this effort. So, according to M.me Dusablon, another part of the count will diversify its respondents, while volunteers will meet homeless people in community organizations throughout Quebec, especially Wednesday and Thursday.
“This year, the number of community organizations we work with has really increased. One hundred and twenty-five are involved in Montreal alone. So yes, the count is not a panacea and does not cover hidden homelessness, but it allows us to meet more people,” explains Julie Grenier, spokesperson for the Movement to End Homelessness in Montreal ( MMFIM).
Mme Grenier was also working as a volunteer on Tuesday evening during the count. This is her second, since she was also there in 2018. “It is certain that the problem is very complex, and the whole chain of work, from mental housing, right down to frontline shelters, working together,” including to ease the burden of “hidden” homelessness, she says.
Sensitive issues
Although incomplete, the count remains, according to the Ministry of Health and Social Services of Quebec, a necessary exercise. “It’s a way of getting data that we wouldn’t have otherwise. It allows us to adapt all our services,” said Tung Tran, deputy director general of mental health, addictions and homelessness services at the ministry.
Mme Dusablon says, for example, that the 2018 count highlighted how “several people were refused entry to shelters because they were intoxicated”. The data collected has therefore motivated the creation of organizations where consumption is permitted, such as the shelter located in the former Royal Victoria Hospital, she says.
To reach such conclusions, the volunteers who work on the count in the field must therefore ask questions, sometimes delicate ones, of the people they meet. Asked about this by The duty earlier this week, the executive director of the Montreal Homeless and Lonely People’s Support Network (RAPSIM), Annie Savage, said the questions remained “extremely intrusive”, that the approach did not pass “the test of ‘ethics “.
Julie Grenier, for her part, listened attentively to the people she met in the field, sometimes for more than fifteen minutes. She specifies that she makes sure to ask her questions “in a respectful manner” and to “respect the dignity” of her interlocutors above all. “Feel very comfortable letting me know your limits,” she told everyone.