07/25/12 – Jin Zhao – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, scotthorton.org.
Liberty Radio Network.
All right, our first guest on the show today is Jin Zhao, writing at Alternet.
How about this for supporting the troops?
Help our 55,000 female homeless veterans.
Welcome to the show, how's it going?
Good, how are you?
I'm doing great, appreciate you joining us today.
Thank you for having me today.
So this is a very important article here.
You would think that this would be a big headline at USA Today or something.
Right, it should be.
But no, here we are, we got to look at Alternet to find it.
The story of the 55,000 female homeless veterans.
Wow, do you know how many of those are from the current set of wars, or these go back to Desert Storm, and for how long?
Well, this is sort of a number that includes women veterans from different periods of wars.
But, I mean, there are several different numbers, but this one is more encompassing, I would say, a more encompassing number.
Do you have any kind of estimate of how many of these are, say, for example, Iraq War veterans?
You know, actually, the numbers are really hard to get for homeless veterans, exactly from which war period, because of the documentation and everything is very difficult.
So this is an estimate.
I do not have an exact number for each different operation.
Well, I am sure it is not a few.
But women are deployed in Iraq and Pakistan, no, actually, Afghanistan, are significantly more than the Gulf War.
So, four or five times.
Sure, sure.
Well, as we can imagine, most of that war was just fought from Saudi Arabia.
And, you know, mostly air war, that kind of thing.
And then the ground war was over in a very short amount of time.
But, as opposed to, you know, the second time around there, or Afghanistan.
Okay, so now, you say that the VA is projecting the number to grow to 15 million by 2036?
I guess that is total homeless veterans, not just the women, right?
No, that is not of homeless, but women who are deployed.
Oh, I am sorry.
Yeah.
Women serving in the military are going to increase.
And also, you know, so homeless veterans who are women will be increasing too.
Okay, and now, most of this article is just about the hows and the whys.
Most of this article is just about the hows and the whys.
And, I guess, it sounds so obvious once you read it in English in a minute, you know, in a moment, actually.
Then, all of a sudden, you know it is true.
But, I never really thought of it exactly in this way before.
But, here is the sentence.
Research shows that trauma is a gateway to homelessness.
And that is really the story that you talk about here.
Women who either participate in battle or are raped by their comrades in arms, or their commanding officers, oftentimes.
They then get into this downward spiral where matters just get worse and worse and worse for them.
And that is really where the homelessness comes from.
Yeah, exactly.
Actually, I guess this has been studied for a long time, but the media never reported this.
Actually, 81 to 93% of female veterans have been exposed to some type of trauma.
And that is an extremely high percentage.
And there is overwhelming evidence that shows that this sort of trauma experience is one of the very significant risk factors that contributes to homelessness among these women.
So, the media have never really paid enough attention to it, I would say.
Alright, so now explain exactly how this works.
I don't want to just sum it up too quickly.
Can you give us an example?
I guess you went and talked with this lady, Jennifer, for example, who talked about what happened to her.
And it seemed like a pretty, I hate to say it, but kind of a cookie cutter sort of process for how this works from veteran to, or from soldier to homeless.
Yeah, I think Jennifer's case is a very telling case and really sad.
She joined the military when she was 20 and she was sexually assaulted when she was 21.
And she told me that she was going to make military her career.
And that was completely, it was like the end of her career, right?
So, she was assaulted and the person who assaulted her was convicted.
But afterwards, she was discharged honorably in, I think, early 1990s.
But after that, she was not...
Because she didn't really receive the care that she needed.
She didn't tell anybody what happened, you know, during...when she was assaulted.
She didn't even tell her ex-boyfriend, ex-husband, and her family.
She didn't tell anybody.
So, and she just tried to deal with it herself, by herself.
And she got into addiction because it was just too much to deal with.
And only when she was high, she could escape from that trauma.
And she told me that she loved her children, but she couldn't take care of them.
She couldn't.
They were not her priority.
Her priority was getting high and not to think about it, right?
So, and then in the end, she divorced and she lost her family.
She lost her job.
She couldn't keep a job.
And so, in the end, she became homeless.
And homelessness, the experience of being homeless itself was traumatic, too.
You know, it was extremely hard to live on the streets and, you know, hunger and everything.
And she did go to some shelters, but the conditions in the shelters were not ideal, especially for a woman.
And people were still, you know, some people were still using drugs in those shelters.
And they just, she told me that they just went in and out like a hotel.
So, she didn't feel like she was getting even, you know, like mental health care.
Or, you know, like people were not really caring much about what's really going on with her.
And look at, and also, you know, when you look at addiction, it's actually a coping mechanism for these people.
You know, but to people who don't understand that, it becomes a sort of vice, right, to discriminate.
You know, like some shelters will have regulations to, they will test people who applied for shelter.
And if they have to get clean before they receive service.
But nowadays, I think there are people who are really advocating for, you know, providing services to whoever.
You're saying the criminalization of drugs makes it difficult for people who are addicts to actually seek help in the first place.
Exactly.
Because that's actually part of the reason why, you know, they become homeless.
And, you know, part of the reason, part of the, actually it's the result of traumatic experience.
One of the effects is drug addiction.
So, she ended up, you know, in the streets.
But fortunately, she was introduced to this program at the Veteran Village of San Diego.
And this organization has a long history of serving veterans with mental illnesses.
Jim, we got to hold it right there.
It's Jin Zhao.
We're talking about one example of the 55,000 or so homeless female veterans in the United States today.
And what can be done about it.
And we'll be right back after this.
Check out the piece at Alternet.org.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Check out all the archives.
More than 2,500 interviews going back to 2003 there at ScottHorton.org.
We're talking with Jin Zhao from Alternet.
How about this for supporting the troops?
Help our 55,000 female homeless veterans.
A woman joins up the service.
Instead of making a man out of her, they just rape her and throw her in the garbage.
Then, she's a wreck.
So, she turns to the bottle, to pills and worse.
Then, life falls apart.
Loss of employment.
Loss of family and friend connections due to the substance abuse.
Then, homelessness.
Then, you know, probably a lot of the time anyway, more rape.
More trauma.
More, you know, living tough on the street.
And more of a wreck.
And even more dependence on drugs.
And this horrible downward spiral.
Unlike the whole be all you can be.
And then, you know, once you're done working for the government and the military, you'll be able to be a professional for a living like they say on the TV ads.
It's much more like you remember from all of your own lives driving around and seeing Vietnam veterans on the side of the road.
Begging for coins because they can't get by.
It's the very same thing.
I don't know how you thought it was going to be different this time, but it's not.
We're talking with our guest, Jen, about a woman named Jennifer.
Right now, anyway.
A 45-year-old homeless veteran.
Thought she was going to be a career marine.
But instead, her life fell completely apart.
And actually, at the commercial break, we were at the part where there's a silver lining.
And after, what, 20 years of this incredibly hard life, she has now finally turned a page and is taking care of herself.
Is that right, Jen?
Yes, exactly.
And that's why it's really important for us to, you know, for the service providers and also society as a whole to really understand the problems for these women.
Because we can change.
Like Jennifer, she's turning her life around because she's receiving, you know, the service she needed.
So, the service I'm talking about will be, you know, something even simple as just securing the security for, ensuring the security for these women who stay in these shelters or residential programs, you know, when they have other, for instance, male veterans also in the same facility.
Something like simple like that, or even like the way they ask questions when they are assessed, they are being assessed, and the way questions are asked.
Sometimes if you ask a very sensitive question, it might trigger their memory of trauma.
So, those things.
So, it's very important for us to understand where they're coming from, and they do have special needs.
And we can change.
Yeah, well, you know, that's such an important thing, right?
I can see, you know, like you're saying about some of these places that are meant to help people.
They're, you know, probably just because of the volume of people coming in and out.
They just become so institutionalized.
It's such a cinder block room instead of a real personal relationship and the real kind of understanding that it takes to really help someone who's that bad off.
And like you're saying, if you can really drive home the truth that, you know, with these people, with, you know, not necessarily all homeless people maybe, or whatever, with this segment of people, you really got to get to the core of the trauma and the, you know, the spiral down from there in order to get a handle on the situation.
And so, you know, I can see why, you know, if there's a few dozen or a few hundred places that it's some small percentage that actually get it and are really, you know, striking the root of the problem.
Exactly.
And it's especially hard for women veterans because, you know, they're the minority in military.
And also they are the minority in the homeless, veteran homeless population as well because they're, you know, a small percentage compared to the male people in the military.
So it's very easy for people to kind of overlook their needs.
Yeah, I was just going to say, we're not trying to exclude the men here.
We're just trying to make sure to include the women.
That's all.
Exactly.
Some people, I saw some comments on my article.
Some people are saying like, what about men?
What about the male veterans?
They are the majority.
Yes, they are the majority, but that exactly is why it's so hard for these women to get, you know, the service they need because other services are designed, you know, primarily for men.
And their needs are overlooked.
And it's not, I'm not saying that, you know, we shouldn't neglect men, but it's just we need to recognize real problems, real issues, challenges for these people.
Well, you know, I don't think it's fair for us to leave out the real point here too, which is that in this society, it needs to no longer be, I mean, we need to win this argument kind of once and for all.
Friends don't let friends join the military.
And, you know, if your cousin's going to let her daughter join up, then you scream at her until she understands how stupid and horrible and wrong that is.
This is not a TV ad where everything's great and everybody walks around in their dress uniform prancing around with a sword and whatever.
This is killing people.
And oftentimes if it's women in the military, what, you know, somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the time it means getting raped.
It means having your life destroyed.
Getting hired to be a professional killer for whoever the politicians want you to kill.
That's not honor.
It's not valor.
It's not glory.
It's not the American flag.
It's not okay.
It doesn't matter whether TV says that we all agree that it's okay.
It's not okay.
It's wrong.
It's terrible.
It's oftentimes literally suicide.
Well, I think, you know, people have different reasons and I find that some women, young women, they were actually, before their military services, they were abused.
And the reason why they joined the military was to get out of these abusive situations.
They thought that the military will be a way out, it will be a career, you know, somehow they can get out of the household.
Maybe, you know, there was an abuser there.
So I think it's, I mean, it's even sadder.
Battered women going from one abuser to another.
Right?
Another salvation from the last one.
Exactly.
And then when they got out, also, we can't, some of the women are, you know, re-entering into another abusive relationship.
And, you know, it's just, to me, I was just not really shocked, but I'm really sad.
It's sort of like a precious circle for women.
And I think as society as a whole, we need to really pay attention to this.
We need to pay attention to girls who are in abusive situations so that they have other choices, they have other options, rather than joining the military or something else.
Right?
Right.
Yeah.
So, can you please tell us some more before we got to go here, we got a couple of minutes, where people can get good help, informed, as we talked about before, help that's going to focus on the real underlying trauma and all that kind of thing and really help these people.
I think people can talk to their liaison.
And also, there are a few, check out the National Center on Family Homelessness.
I think that's the organization that really helps specialized and trauma-informed care.
And I think especially for providers, care providers, check out this organization.
And also, the Women's Bureau in the Department of Labor, they actually have published a guide for trauma-informed care.
So, that's for providers.
Yeah, for veterans, just try to find resources, talk to your liaison, talk to care providers, ask about trauma-informed care.
And also, the most important is to learn to trust others and to just talk to, like I talked to Jennifer, she never talked to anybody about her trauma because she's ashamed or she felt like she has to deal with it herself.
I think one important step for people in that situation is to open up to others and to get support.
And to get support from people who are in service or people who are around you.
All right, everybody.
That's Jin Zhao.
I'm sorry, I hope I said your name right.
She's a freelance journalist, multimedia producer and photographer.
She's written for The Nation and this one is at Alternet.
Oh, wow, her blog is WeDon'tKnowAboutChina.com.
You and I are going to have to talk more.
Alternet.org.
How about this?
For supporting the troop, 55,000 female homeless veterans.
Thank you, Jin.
Thank you.