The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:
(a) Research has found that women and men who experienced food and housing insecurity in the past 12 months reported a significantly higher 12-month prevalence of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner compared to women and men who did not experience food and housing insecurity.
(b) In a California study, women who experienced interpersonal violence in the last year had almost four times the odds of reporting housing instability than women who did not experience interpersonal violence.
(c) Research indicates that upward of 57 percent of all homeless women report that domestic violence was the immediate cause of their homelessness. Additionally, 38 percent of all survivors of domestic violence become homeless at some point in their lives.
(d) A survivor of domestic violence will often leave the person causing harm multiple times before finally escaping the violence, therefore experiencing multiple periods of homelessness.
(e) The violence and experience of homelessness not only impacts the adult survivors of domestic violence, but also their children. Among mothers with children experiencing homelessness, more than 80 percent had previously experienced domestic violence.
(f) The state’s Homeless Data Integration System (HDIS) shows that in 2020, 33,686 Californians experiencing homelessness were victims of domestic violence, and that women, transgender, and gender nonconforming people were 43 percent of those experiencing homelessness.
(g) Unaccompanied women are individuals who identify as women, 18 years of age and older, who are experiencing homelessness while not in the company of children or other dependents.
(h) Unaccompanied women constitute 29 percent, or nearly one in three of all adult individuals experiencing homelessness in the United States, for a total of 120,015 women, constituting over one-half of all unhoused women nationally, according to Point-in-Time data summarized in the 2020 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR).
(i) California has the single largest population of women experiencing homelessness in the nation. According to HDIS, 102,112 women experienced homelessness in California in 2020. According to the 2020 AHAR, 53,505 women were experiencing homelessness as individuals in California. Unaccompanied women constitute one in three of all unhoused Californians, and 40 percent of individuals experiencing homelessness.
(j) Unaccompanied women endure high rates of first-time homelessness, longer spells of homelessness, and higher barriers in accessing stable housing. Unaccompanied women are disproportionately women of color, particularly Black women, and they report extremely high incidence of trauma, whether physical, sexual, or psychological in nature, that is compounded by their ongoing homelessness.
(Added by Stats. 2022, Ch. 665, Sec. 2. (SB 914) Effective January 1, 2023.)