‍The Hidden Face of Rough Sleeping 

“I feel like I regularly have to tell my story over and over again, but nothing changes.”

- Women's Census 2024 Respondent

In the introduction of Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez writes that when we talk about “people,” we’re usually talking about men. Men are treated as the default; women, as the deviation. If we want to understand women’s experiences, we have to go looking for them explicitly and intentionally. This dynamic shapes many, if not all, areas of public life and policy. The homelessness sector is no different. 

The Women’s Rough Sleeping Census is an annual release led by a coalition of homelessness and Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) charities—including Solace, the Single Homelessness Project, and Change Grow Live— in collaboration with London Councils. Now in its third year, this trailblazing initiative was developed to confront a long-standing blind spot in national homelessness data: the invisibility of women who are rough sleeping. The most recent UK Government snapshot estimated that in England 83% of individuals who are rough sleeping are men, and 15% are women (the remainder is unidentified). Yet the newly published 2024 Women’s Census tells a different story—identifying over ten times as many women experiencing rough sleeping than the Government snapshot. So, why are Government reports miscounting women? And why does it matter that we take a gendered- lens to address the gap?

When you picture someone who is experiencing homelessness and specifically rough sleeping, chances are you’re flooded with stereotypes and are imagining a single man in a sleeping bag on the pavement. There are some specific reasons why that image is not completely inaccurate, for example in England the eligibility criteria for a Main Housing Duty often categorises single men as having “no priority need,” leaving them disproportionately likely to sleep rough. But this narrow lens erases other realities: women are also rough sleeping. So why don’t we see them? Because, as Lucy Campbell, Head of Multiple Disadvantage for the Single Homeless Project, so eloquently put it, “If I found myself homeless tonight with nowhere to go but the streets of London, the last thing I’d do would be bed down on the pavement. Why? Because I’m a woman, and to spend the night lying on a dark street, alone, would be terrifying.” Women sleep rough too, but they do so differently. 

Women’s homelessness is uniquely and intentionally invisible. Instead of sleeping in obvious public spaces, women, who face high risk of violence and abuse, often resort to “hidden” forms of homelessness. A study with women in focus groups from York, Leeds, and Bristol spoke openly about the realities of rough sleeping. They described being spat upon, urinated on, having hot coffee thrown at them. Many were robbed, harassed for sex, and physically assaulted. The response to these circumstances is logical: they hide. Rather than sleeping openly and visibly, women are more likely to find shelter in 24 hour cafes, public toilets, empty sheds, anywhere they might be overlooked. And if nowhere feels safe enough to stop, they often keep walking. All night. 

This explains why the government’s current definition of rough sleeping, used for purposes of data collection requiring that people be seen “sleeping, about to bed down or bedded down in the open air”, fails women so profoundly. If you only count the people who are visible in parks, pavements, or doorways at 2am, you will not see women in a Cafe Nero at 10pm, or a bus depot at 4am, or crouched behind a bin in an industrial estate until dawn. And as a result, these women are left uncounted and unsupported. 

Created in 2022, the Women’s Rough Sleeping Census addresses a critical data gap. Expanding from a London pilot, the 2024 census included 33 London and 55 non-London local authorities. The census takes a gender-informed, multi-channel approach. The ‘snapshot’ portion of the survey is conducted over seven days, as opposed to a single night. Women who have experienced rough sleeping in the past three months are included, not just those seen rough sleeping. Participating LAs are required to conduct a minimum of six hours of gender-informed outreach per borough. Gender informed outreach means designing outreach with an understanding that women’s experiences of homelessness are distinct—and often shaped by trauma, fear, and social norms around gender and space. This outreach acknowledges that women's homelessness is distinct, often linked to trauma, fear, and gendered social norms, making them less likely to be found in obvious locations. Gender-informed outreach also focuses on staffing (including women on teams), timing (not just early mornings), and trauma-informed practices, ensuring privacy and choice in engagement.

In practice this could look like an outreach team, including at least one woman, stepping into a 24-hour McDonald’s at 10pm. They’re not just looking for someone lying under a blanket in a doorway. They’re scanning for women sitting quietly in corners, charging a phone, nursing a single coffee for hours. They ask her questions sensitively—about where she’s been staying the past few nights, about safety, about domestic abuse. They listen. They don’t push. They thank her. They offer immediate signposting, if she wants it. And then they leave the McDonald’s, and head to a hospital waiting room, a 24-hour bus line, a known hotspot behind a shopping centre—places most generic counts never go. All the while, they’re collecting the kind of data that traditional snapshots miss entirely.

In addition to on the street surveys with women, the Women's Census conducted cross-sector meetings in LAs where services, such as outreach teams, health providers, substance use services, shared information about the approximate number of women they’ve supported. The census listens to women and the services that already know them—offering anonymity and sensitivity to the way women rough sleep: intermittently, unsafely, and out of sight. And in doing so, it doesn’t just collect data—it dignifies experience. 

The 2024 Women's Census documented 1,014 women who had experienced rough sleeping in the preceding three months. Over half (54%) had done so in hidden, unofficial locations, such as buses, cafes, A&E waiting rooms. As tragically expected, domestic violence was identified as the primary catalyst for women's rough sleeping and women reported being frequent targets of assault and abuse, particularly sexual assault, while sleeping rough. A disturbing 24% of women reported spending the night with a stranger or acquaintance in the last three months. Bringing to light safety concerns and underscoring the extreme measures women are forced to take to find overnight shelter. Furthermore, 33% of women indicated they were not receiving support from either a housing officer or a homelessness services. This underscores a failing in the accessibility and tailoring of existing assistance, suggesting that current provisions are either insufficient or  inappropriate to a large proportion of the women who desperately need them. The census also revealed systemic failure in the current homelessness accommodation framework: 365 women, approximately 13% of those surveyed, had previously been housed in homelessness accommodation before resorting to rough sleeping. This suggests that existing provisions frequently fail to meet the specific and nuanced needs of women, potentially due to issues such as safety concerns within communal settings, a lack of trauma-informed care, or an inability to accommodate complex needs such as those arising from domestic violence.

Counting people is about more than just numbers. It’s about forcing the system to acknowledge that these women exist—and that their experiences demand dedicated, gender-responsive solutions. Right now, many local authorities report zero women sleeping rough simply because they’re not in the ‘right’ places at the ‘right’ time. As a researcher in the homelessness sector, I’ve heard endless debates about how best to support men on the streets or women in temporary accommodation due to domestic violence, and while these conversations are critically important, virtually no one is talking about those women who slip through every crack in between and experience rough sleeping. If services continue to be commissioned based on the current government snapshot, the same women will continue to be overlooked. But the Women’s Census offers an alternative: a method rooted in care, credibility, and the realities of women’s lives. It proves what we’ve known for a long time, that the problem isn’t that women aren’t there, It’s that we haven’t been looking properly.

• Emily-Rae Foreman is Data and Evaluation Lead at the Centre for Homelessness Impact 
• The image used in this blog is of Michelle, who took part in our images project. The images aim to combat the negative stereotypes of people experiencing homelessness by using images of real people.  Image credit: Centre for Homelessness Impact / Jeff Hubbard