Graphic content warning: This article contains detailed accounts of sexual violence that some readers may find distressing.
Maya doesn’t sleep much. San Francisco’s streets offer little privacy, and she trusts no one. But eventually, fatigue catches up to her. She collapses from exhaustion on a Tenderloin sidewalk.
“I’m just so fucking tired,” she said through tears last week at the corner of Jones and Ellis streets. “But you just don’t want to go to sleep. That’s when they prey on you, especially the older men.”
Women living on San Francisco’s streets say they’re experiencing a spike in sexual violence as city leaders wage a crackdown on encampments. For the past year, cleaning crews, cops, and outreach workers have fanned out across the city to dismantle and dispose of tents, quickly improving street conditions but often leaving homeless people to sleep on the sidewalk or in parks, as outreach workers say shelters are constantly at or near capacity.
Between July 2024 and June, the number of tents on sidewalks fell by almost half, from 319 to 165, according to the city’s quarterly count. Women make up 32% of San Francisco’s roughly 8,300 homeless people, according to a 2024 survey.
For protection while sleeping without a tent, some women disguise themselves in men’s clothes. Others say they’ve resorted to urinating on themselves to ward off assault. Most report turning to sex work in order to afford hotel rooms — or even just to sleep in a customer’s car.
“I’ve been raped more times than I’ve had consensual sex in the last year,” said a homeless woman named Rebecca. “I’ve been outside in the cold and had some guy offer me shelter, and the next thing I know, I wake up, and he’s raping me.”
Rebecca said she was arrested this year for having a tent but has no way to pay the fine.
“I’m fucking homeless. I don’t have money like that,” she said. “Now I’ve got to go sell my body to pay the fucking citation?”
The Standard interviewed eight homeless women who say the city’s tent ban, implemented July 30, 2024, has made them more susceptible to sexual violence. Five of the women said they had traded sex for a place to sleep. The Standard found these women, who ranged in age from early 30s to more than 60, by walking the streets of the Mission, SoMa, and Tenderloin neighborhoods. Their full names have been omitted out of concern for their safety.
Sitting across from Maya in the Tenderloin, a woman named Megan recounted waking up in a Mission alley this year to a stranger on top of her. She screamed as the masked man hopped on an electric scooter and rode away.
“He was just laughing,” Megan said, “taunting me.”
‘A sitting duck’
Racked with exhaustion and pain, several of the women interviewed by The Standard were unable to recall the specifics of their assaults. At times, they said, they were simply too tired to resist their attackers, piecing together what had happened only much later. The apparent surge in violence is difficult to corroborate, as none of the women said they reported the incidents to police.
At a women’s drop-in center run by the nonprofit Community Forward SF, co-CEO Sammie Rayner said she’s seen an influx of new clients over the past month. She is unsure of the cause for this spike as many women arrive unable to speak due to the trauma they’ve faced.
“They’re nonverbal and can’t articulate what’s happened to them,” Rayner said. “All they can say is: ‘shower.’”
Homeless women have long faced high levels of violence, with about 16% reporting sexual assault, a 2023 study of California’s homeless population found. Researchers believe that crimes committed against homeless people are severely underreported due to distrust in law enforcement. Many advocates and researchers suspect that the city’s crackdown on tents — paired with a lack of shelter beds — has left homeless women even more vulnerable.
“When you’re out there on the street, you’re just a sitting duck,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, a homelessness researcher at UCSF. “We seem to be focusing on tents and not people.”
Couper Orona, who is formerly homeless and now volunteers as a medic for people living on San Francisco’s streets, says many of the women she works with are in a heightened state of distress since the tent ban was implemented under former Mayor London Breed.
“When you’re a female out on the street, all eyes are looking at you, waiting for you to lie down,” Orona said. “Having that little bit of nylon between you and the world is so important. When that’s not there, anything can happen.”
Since July 30, 2024, a month after a Supreme Court ruling allowed for widespread enforcement of public camping laws, the city has confiscated at least 141 tents, up from 32 during the 12 months prior, according to a log obtained through a public records request. Police have made 1,048 arrests for public camping during that time, up from 112 over the previous 12 months, according to The Standard’s analysis of arrest data. In 2023, police made nine illegal lodging arrests.
The change in strategy followed a fierce debate between city officials and advocates over the effectiveness and ethics of tent sweeps. Though the debate has died down, the monthly rate of public camping arrests has gone up slightly since Mayor Daniel Lurie took office in January.
In a statement, police said crime is down 28% this year and that its officers don’t arrest people for being homeless when reporting a crime.
“The San Francisco Police Department takes crimes against our unhoused population very seriously,” the statement read. “The SFPD continues to work collaboratively with our city partners to get individuals resources, including shelter. We are committed to ensuring our streets are clean and safe for everyone.”
Lurie’s office did not respond to a request for comment. In public statements, the mayor has acknowledged the shortage of shelter beds while stressing the importance of keeping streets clean. Lurie this month abandoned his campaign promise to add 1,500 shelter beds in six months, instead announcing plans to reform the homeless response system to focus on addiction and mental illness.
Emily Cohen, a spokesperson for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, urged women to apply for the shelter waitlist as she said 20 beds designated for females go unused every night.
“Being homeless and living outside is unsafe for everyone, especially vulnerable women,” Cohen said. “The safest thing someone living outside can do, is come into the shelter we are offering.”
However, there were 484 people on the shelter waitlist as of Monday evening. And as the city’s reforms and new investments are still taking shape, the crackdown on tents continues. Every night, homeless women lay exposed on sidewalks, afraid to close their eyes.
“I lost my confidence. I lost everything,” Megan said of her assault. “We try to look out for each other, but we can’t be there every second.”