Heidi Ross was a senior in high school when she hitchhiked from the Anchorage suburb of Eagle River into the city, leaving a dark childhood behind.

“I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she said of that day, around 20 years ago. “I had the clothes on my back.”

After she arrived, without a way to pay rent, she soon found herself trading sex for a place to stay. Next she traded sex for drugs. Using sex to get things she needed made her feel powerful, she said. At 21, she went to work for a pimp who promised to take care of her.

“It felt strange at first, because I was so used to taking care of myself,” she said. “It felt good. It felt like a piece was missing and it had finally come back.”

Ross said sex work became her “lifestyle”. Eventually, however, she would be the one exploiting young men and women as adrift as she was on that ride into Anchorage.

Sexual exploitation has been an undercurrent of the state’s male-dominated frontier culture since Russian explorers first came to the region, and men flocked to the state during the Gold Rush. Law enforcement, prosecutors and victim advocates have long suspected the state has a high rate of sex trafficking, but the problem has been largely unstudied. Recently, though, a small study of trafficking among homeless youth offered some data to support these suspicions.

Read the rest here.

The post From trafficked to trafficker: youth homelessness and sexual exploitation in Alaska (For The Guardian) appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

How America counts its homeless – and why so many are overlooked

They dressed in several layers of clothing or donned old hats. They carried blankets and cardboard boxes. It was approaching midnight in New York one night in March 2005, and recruits who had been paid $100 each to pretend to be homeless were fanning out across the city.

There were 58 sites dotted throughout the metropolis. Pseudo-homeless people arrived at subway stations in Manhattan, back alleys in Staten Island and Queens, the front steps of a church in the Bronx.

The actors were taking part in a peculiar experiment led by Kim Hopper, a researcher then at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research. The purpose: to analyze the effectiveness of the city’s count of homeless people.

Hopper and his colleagues found that actors at almost one in three of the sites reported being missed by counters. And these were people who wanted to be counted. They did not include the swaths of genuinely homeless ensconced in corners of the city. “Invisibility serves the purpose of security and uninterrupted sleep,” the researchers noted.

Just over a decade later, questions remain about the reliability of America’s biennial street count of homeless people, an extraordinary undertaking in which thousands of volunteers head out into the darkness in cities, forests and deserts around the country.

It still takes place mostly at night, relying on volunteers who are often equipped with nothing more sophisticated than clipboards, pencils and flashlights.

But supporters of the count, which is run by local communities in return for federal dollars and may be the largest tally of homeless people in the world, argue that it is a crucial mechanism to keep track of people who often exist outside of government bureaucracy.

Even if the figures are open to question, they provide a window into the landscape of America’s homelessness problem – and a sense of how it is changing over time.

“The bottom line is that it’s imperfect, but I don’t know that we could do a better job,” said Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania researcher and a principal investigator on the homelessness reports that are presented to Congress annually.

The most recent report found that on one night there were 549,928 homeless people in America.

Read the rest of the story, including scenes from Alaska’s most recent homeless count, here.

The post For The Guardian: Homeless in America appeared first on Julia O'Malley.