Melinda Henneberger on some of the people she meets on the streets of San Francisco:
Women in the camp look out for one another, says her friend Lucia Mercado: “We try to keep all of the females together.” But that strategy isn’t protection enough, here or anywhere elsewhere.
“Most women on the street have been raped,” Catherine Moy, a city councilwoman in Fairfield, who ran a homeless shelter in Solano County, told me. “They end up taking meth to keep themselves awake at night” to try and ward off more attacks.
The South Sudanese refugees in a camp in Uganda I’ve written about a couple of times were, without any exaggeration, better off materially than these Americans living two miles from the seat of power, such as it is, in the fifth-largest economy in the world.
And the stories homeless women like Gallegos tell me about being raped remind me of Sudan, too: When women in Darfur told the world that they couldn’t even go out looking for firewood without being attacked by the notorious Janjaweed soldiers, the world was properly horrified.
Yet when it happens here, who knows or cares?