Domestic violence a risk at every stage for homeless women

For those who call the National Domestic Violence Hotline, the abuse they’ve endured isn’t always the first thing on their minds.

In many cases, their most immediate need is a safe place to stay.

Experts, advocates and survivors say domestic violence often leaves women with nowhere else to go but the streets or a shelter.

And when they do end up homeless, they’re more susceptible to falling prey to an abusive partner while navigating an already dangerous situation or struggling to find housing.

Avoiding life on the streets while escaping domestic violence is extremely complicated, with many survivors navigating searches for housing and employment, custody battles and healing from the trauma they’ve sustained while trying to stay safe, said both advocates and survivors themselves.

There is no single solution to keeping those survivors from becoming homeless, said Nikhita Ved, the hotline’s chief programs officer. But many who’ve called the hotline say they’re most in need of an affordable home.

“When we first started opening the lines and asking survivors what they needed, historically, it’s been housing,” she said.

Sister Jose Women’s Center founder Jean Fedigan said housing is the most pertinent need for Tucson’s homeless women as well. And a recent study by the Arizona State University School of Social Work’s Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research, which surveyed 100 women at Sister Jose’s during the 2025 fiscal year, indicated that more than a three-quarters had been assaulted by an intimate partner.

More than half also reported being sexually assaulted, and 58 percent said they’d been forced to leave a permanent home under the threat of violence.

But finding an affordable place to stay is a growing challenge as the costs of housing have continued to rise.

A 2025 assessment of local housing needs conducted by Pima County estimated that the community was short by 21,700 housing units, including 8,000 units specifically intended to help people out of homelessness. According to the county’s ECOnorthwest analysis and data from the Tucson Association of Realtors, the median price of a single-family home in the area rose from $169,000 in 2000 to $355,000 this year.

Despite that, U.S. Census data showed that the median household income in Pima County as of 2024 was only $72,000. Inside the city of Tucson, that figure is even lower: just $60,000 per household.

Fedigan also pointed to a pattern among older women: the loss of a partner’s income.

“If your partner also has Social Security, now you have almost $2,000, you can rent a studio apartment,” she said. But when that partner dies or leaves, “whatever your funds are, they’re cut in half,” often with no family able to help. “So many times people who were marginally stable are now unstable and homeless because they need these other things.”

‘Very complicated very fast’

But even in communities where affordable housing is more abundant, Ved said, securing it can be difficult without the right documents, a credit history and steady employment record.

Survivors can lose those things when they’re in an abusive relationship or when they leave.

Many survivors face immigration issues and difficulty finding childcare — challenges that also hinder their ability to hold a steady job.

And, she said, domestic violence shelters throughout the United States are usually underfunded, meaning their beds fill quickly and many survivors are left with nowhere to go.

Recently, The Haven, an inpatient drug rehabilitation center for women — often serving those who are homeless — faced the possibility of closing. CEO Aimee Graves said in a letter on the rehab center’s website it was dealing with issues with the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System’s payment and reimbursement systems.

Emilia Honkasaari, The Haven’s spokesperson, later said the nonprofit got a $50,000 donation in June and plans to match it through fundraising.

“Our plan is to stay open and keep on serving women as long as we can,” she wrote in an email.

And it’s not as simple as going to a homeless shelter, Ved said. Often, those environments include both men and women, which could make some domestic violence survivors feel unsafe. They also don’t usually offer onsite resources specifically tailored to survivors’ needs.

“It gets very complicated very fast,” Ved said. “For a survivor to get out safely, so many things have to go right.”

Fedigan said the line between domestic violence, trafficking and street violence is thinner than most people realize.

“So let us say that you have a partner on the street, some guy has said to you, ‘I’ll keep you safe,’ and you say, ‘OK,’ and so you lay your blanket down over by him, and in a week he says, ‘You owe me,’ and then another week he may very well say, ‘And you owe my friends,’ and if you don’t do it, then I’ll either kill you or beat you up, or whatever,” she said.

And Fedigan had her own stories of how domestic violence had set different women back as they searched for shelter. She recalled Diana, who she begged one night in her early days as director not to leave to go see her abusive boyfriend. She was found dead in a dumpster the next morning.

She also mentioned a client she worked with for six years, Mickey. When Mickey became seriously ill, Fedigan took her to St. Mary’s Hospital, where they learned the infection she had gone systemic, leaving abscesses along her spine.

“The nurse in me said, ‘Now the window is open here,'” Fedigan said, so they secured her long-term care and disability benefits. Mickey lived on her own for two years and now resides in supportive housing. “She’s a success. She’s a big success,” Fedigan said. “She has serious mental illness, she’s medically challenged, and she is just as nice as she can be, but someone is there.”

‘Change our understanding’

For Perla Eriksen, a resident at The Haven on May 16, the complications of both domestic violence and homelessness persisted even after she found somewhere to stay.

Before early April, when she was sent to The Haven as part of a diversion program in a drug trafficking case, she’d been chronically homeless for about half a decade.

In that time, she said, she’d been held hostage and forcibly impregnated by one man, manipulated into an abusive relationship with another and spent months on end living in a wash.

She’d grown up witnessing domestic violence between her parents, she said. It happened so often, she said, that it seemed normal to her. And she’d been sexually assaulted by a relative as a preteen.

Ved said understanding what a healthy relationship is, and how to avoid an unhealthy one, is another solution that can prevent domestic violence altogether.

And overall, she said, society is gradually getting on board with teaching those things to younger generations.

“I believe we’re actually getting better about informing our society about what domestic violence looks like,” she said. “You have 1st-graders who can understand what’s okay and what’s not and what boundaries are.”

Eriksen said a solid understanding of those things would have definitely helped her before homelessness became her reality.

She’s enjoyed a healthy relationship for 15 years with her husband, Armando, with whom she has a teenage daughter. But even then, she said, she hadn’t dealt with the trauma she’d experienced as a child.

Eriksen said her mental health really began to spiral downward when her brother died in 2020.

Within about two years, her husband died from an accidental overdose, leaving her with no income.

It was while she was homeless, she said, that she became more susceptible to experiencing violence from men.

“We tend, as a society, to think these women are just prostitutes, they’re no good, they’re addicted, they probably deserve being hit like that,” Fedigan said. “It’s wrong, and until we change our understanding of what’s going on, we’re going to continue to have this kind of problem.”

Even simply getting some sleep is a dangerous situation for homeless women, said Fedigan.

“For safety they’re going to walk all night. They’re going to do whatever it takes to stay safe,” she said. “If you’re asleep on a park bench or in a stairwell, you’re cornered, and you may not be able to get away.”

That dynamic is part of why Sister Jose’s allows pets in its shelter, she said. Because of rules at some homeless shelters and domestic violence shelters restrict both pets and children, women fleeing domestic violence also face the prospect of separation from family members who rely on them.

“Women started bringing their pets to the door, but they would not come in or spend the night unless their pet was with them. That pet became their family, it becomes their friend, it becomes their protector,” she said.

“That pet is going to alert,” she added. “It gives you that split second to run if you need to.”

‘Violence and hunger’

Shortly after Eriksen became homeless, she got an under-the-table gig housesitting an apartment for a woman who’d moved, which gave her a temporary place to stay.

In 2022, she was introduced to a man at a party by mutual friends. When he tried to give her his number, she declined. She accepted it at a second party. Shortly after, he asked her to dinner, where he kidnapped and sexually assaulted her .

“Nobody looked for me because I was on the streets already. I went ‘ghost’ on my family,” Eriksen said.

Eriksen quickly became pregnant. The man held her in the apartment she was watching for nearly the duration of her pregnancy, regularly sexually and physically assaulting her. When they would go out, she said, the man made it clear he had a gun on him and would use it if she tried to escape. She’d been using drugs before, but the man introduced her to fentanyl while she was carrying the baby.

Shortly before she had the child, he threw her out of a vehicle in the Sam Hughes neighborhood. Someone saw the state she was in and called an ambulance.

“You could tell she was bruised and burned and something was not right,” said Eriksen’s roommate, Lea Hanan, who translated parts of an interview on her behalf.

Both she and the baby, a girl, suffered from withdrawals once Eriksen gave birth.

“The baby came out very small because she wasn’t attended to as a pregnant woman,” said Hanan, speaking for Eriksen. “He didn’t give her food. She wasn’t attended to properly.”

The man came to the hospital, she said, but she refused to see him. Hospital staff, sensing something was wrong, called the police.

“From the first day I got there, they knew something was wrong,” Eriksen said.

The man fled to Mexico. And as of May, Eriksen didn’t know where he was. Ultimately, the baby was adopted by Eriksen’s cousin. And she “disappeared” back into homelessness.

“Being on the street, there’s a lot of violence and hunger,” she said.

‘It’s a man’s world’

A few years later, she began a relationship with someone she’d known for years and became pregnant again. This time would be different, she believed, because she trusted her partner and wanted to be with him.

“I got pregnant because we both wanted to have a baby,” she said. “He was a good guy until the day I got pregnant.”

That relationship lasted about seven months. She first moved with him into his mother’s home, then they got an apartment together when she was in her second trimester.

“That was when he started beating me, cheating on me,” she said.

She added that she was still addicted, and he’d keep the drugs away from her, intent on making her sick through withdrawal symptoms before letting her have them. He would also regularly lock her out of their shared home to bring in other women.

Women frequently return to abusers rather than stay on the street, Fedigan said.

‘“It’s not unusual for them to say, ‘But I love him,’ and back they go. ‘He really didn’t mean to hit me,'” she said.

Things came to a head in Eriksen’s relationship when she waited on the nearby stairwell of the apartment complex, where she saw him come home with his former sister-in-law.

“I was still in love with him, honestly. Because at first, he was perfect,” she said.

Eriksen began banging on the door. Then she broke the door’s window to get inside. This time, when he became violent, she started fighting back. She was detained, she recalled, while nothing happened to him.

“I never called the cops. I never did nothing, because I was scared,” she said. “And when he put that charge on me, I was even more scared.”

“It’s a man’s world. It’s crazy. It’s horrible,” Hanan added.

She returned and stayed for just a little while longer, when he brought home another woman.

She said he gave people pills to help him search for her after she left. Meanwhile, she lived in a wash for about three months, where she befriended others living there.

‘I asked for a second chance’

Right before Eriksen gave birth, she began dating a friend of her father, who she called “Boogie.” He also knew her baby’s father and was even asked to help look for her. When the baby’s father showed Boogie a photo of Eriksen, he recognized her from pictures her father had shown him when the two were in prison together.

Boogie, fearing the child’s father was going to hurt her, set out on a search of his own.

She said the two men found her in the wash at the same time. Because it was so close to New Years’ Eve and her birthday, Boogie suggested the three go out to a restaurant. When her child’s father went to the bathroom, Boogie explained that he was trying to keep her safe.

“There might be a misconception that the violence ends when the survivor leaves,” Ved said. “We know that the most dangerous time for a survivor is when they’ve just left or are preparing to leave.”

The child’s father a few days later, on New Years’ Eve, fired a celebratory shot and accidentally struck a woman nearby. He’d been on probation at the time, and is now back in prison.

Meanwhile, Eriksen caught pneumonia and went to the hospital, where she stayed for two weeks, and started detoxing.

She moved in with Boogie once she was discharged, and the baby girl was born healthy in March 2025, though she’d been exposed to drugs.

The new baby was also taken into CPS custody, in what Eriksen described as a traumatic separation, and placed with her paternal aunt. She said, days after the girl was born, she briefly left her hospital room to go to a nearby methadone clinic. She’d believed the baby would be watched over while she left for a few hours to get the medicine she needed. When she returned to the room, an officer informed her the baby had been taken.

“She thought that she had lost the baby forever, she didn’t know there was a whole case open for this whole time,” Hanan said.

Hospital staff handed her an empty car seat and sent her home to an empty crib. She relapsed that day.

About six months later, she and Boogie were in a serious car crash. They separated shortly afterward because she was unable to get clean at the time.

She was later arrested on drug charges and held in jail for a month. Then, she “went on the run” until she was re-arrested in March.

“They wanted to send me to prison, but I asked for a second chance,” she said. A judge allowed her to start a two-month stay at The Haven instead.

‘More life available’

Fedigan measures success differently than many.

“Everybody wants to say, ‘How many times were you housed?’ That is only one small measure of success. Building confidence and trust, and having them come back and ask for help — that’s success. And it may take more than once,” she said.

Both she and Eriksen said they see success happening in small ways now, rather than all at once.

While she was at The Haven, Eriksen’s youngest daughter was regularly brought to the center for visits. They share a strong bond, Hanan observed.

And a week prior to her interview with the Tucson Sentinel, Eriksen’s middle daughter came to visit. It was the first time Eriksen and the girl, now a toddler, had met since she was born. It didn’t go how she had hoped.

“I would just freeze when I saw her. Everything started coming to my mind again,” she said. “I thought I was going to handle it better, but it’s something I need to work on.”

Though regaining custody of both girls is going to be a struggle, Eriksen said she was still trying. However, she said, CPS hadn’t been clear with her about what her parental rights were, and her caseworker hadn’t responded to any of her calls or emails.

The possibility of reunification with her youngest two girls was her biggest motivator to start treatment at The Haven.

“I will do whatever I have to do,” she said. “If it has to be three, six months or a year, I’ll do that.”

Staff at The Haven helped her reunite with her family, including her oldest daughter and a brother that live locally. She said she hopes she can reconnect with Boogie too.

Her next family court date was slated for June 3. She was set to graduate from The Haven’s inpatient program the next day. Eriksen had a plan to continue outpatient treatment, find a job and then independent housing. “I can show them that I can have my baby.”

She said she hoped her story reached other women facing homelessness and let them know that finding help is possible. And if that help isn’t immediately available, she said, homeless women should stick together and pool resources.

“She says that when she’s better, she wants to help women like herself,” Hanan said. “There’s more life available to us by helping each other.”

Attempts in July to reach Eriksen again for updates to her story were not successful.