Connecting the Dots: Does Military Sexual Trauma Exacerbate Women Veterans’ Experience of Homelessness?

Housing Instability Seems to Remain an Issue for Survivors, Despite Access to VA Healthcare and Compensation

In my reading recently on women veterans and homelessness from the research literature — don’t worry, it’s fascinating — I came across a very interesting recent study by Ann Elizabeth Montgomery, Ph.D. et al., on a sample of veterans, both male and female, who were enrolled in VA Health Care services. Now, enrollment for veterans of any gender in VA is not a given, but particularly so for women veterans.

“Back in the day,” before the current era, women who served in the military either assumed or were actually, wrongfully told when they left the military that they were not veterans, or were not eligible for VA services — or both. (Sadly, in many cases it has taken women veterans decades to figure out that they are VA-qualified, often through a chance conversation with a younger serving family member, friend or neighbor. Women veterans separating from the military now do know, and have enrolled at VA in increasing numbers. But for many older women veterans, there may have been a lengthy gap in service in which they neither felt acknowledged for their service to their country or realized they were eligible for VA services.)

In my current survey of almost 3,000 women veterans from every era (WWII to the present), for example, four in 10 said they were not told they were eligible. (More than a third of those women are still not enrolled with VA for health care — although technically VA has many other services to offer, including claims, home loans, education, even burial benefits.

In Dr. Montgomery’s study, all the women involved — more than 100,000 — are enrolled in VA for healthcare. This isn’t representative of all the women veterans in the U.S., nor does she imply that it is — it’s merely a characteristic of the specific dataset she had to work with. Mine is a little different, because — as an outsider — I was reaching out to women veterans who are positioned both inside and outside the VA system. Our results should vary somewhat, but it might be telling to see how, and begin to uncover why. (To…