Uncounted Deaths: Exposure, Sexual Violence, and the Patriarchal Racket Keeping Women Homeless

Without shelter, women die. Without safety, we’re raped. And patriarchy keeps it that way.

"A woman can die without shelter—quickly, predictably, and horribly—while the lethal threat of exposure remains bizarrely hidden. This isn’t neglect; it’s patriarchy’s weapon."

"You’ve never read a headline about the number one killer of unhoused people: exposure. Because we don’t want to know. Because if we knew, we’d have to act."

Exposure isn’t just about freezing to death on a snowy street. It’s the heat that cooks you alive when you have nowhere to hide. It’s the damp chill of a coastal night in California or a summer storm in Mexico that leaves your body too cold, too wet, too weak to recover. Exposure can kill you quietly in 50-degree weather—or 105—because the human body is not designed to survive outside without shelter.

I know this because I’ve almost died of exposure multiple times, even in so-called “mild” climates. I’ve shivered so violently I could barely breathe, as temperatures dropped below what anyone would call freezing. I’ve felt the delirium of dehydration and heat exhaustion under a brutal sun. And every time, it was terrifyingly clear: without shelter, death comes quickly.

Yet these deaths don’t make the news. There is no national system tracking deaths of unhoused people. Death certificates may list “hypothermia” or “heatstroke,” but they don’t link the cause to homelessness, so exposure deaths among unhoused people go uncounted. Coroners and officials don’t even consistently record housing status. Many bodies are found late or never identified, incinerated without investigation or inclusion in any statistics.

This silence is deadly. Exposure is almost certainly the leading cause of death among unhoused people, yet it’s almost invisible in public discourse. And what we don’t count, we don’t have to care about.

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A Study Designed to Reveal, But Used to Suppress

I know how this erasure happens because I lived it firsthand. I participated in the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative study, funded by Marc Benioff—CEO of Salesforce and one of San Francisco’s biggest philanthropists. This was a major, multi-million-dollar research project designed to guide policy on homelessness. Researchers paid us to check in monthly, collecting our Social Security numbers, closest contacts, and extensive personal data. This wasn’t a distant survey—they had everything they needed to keep track of us.

But here’s what I discovered when I spoke to the researchers: 40% of study participants disappeared. Despite monthly payments, extensive data, and direct contact, nearly half of the people they were tracking vanished and were never heard from again.

When I heard that number, I was horrified. I told the UCSF researchers directly, in the starkest possible terms: “This is your number one finding. The fact that 40% of participants disappeared, even though you had all their data, should be front and center in your report.” They heard me. They knew. And yet, when the interim study was published, this shocking truth was reduced to a single footnote—devoid of urgency, stripped of context, and effectively hidden.

This wasn’t just a flawed study; it became an instrument of suppression. A study designed to reveal the realities of homelessness instead suppressed them—erasing the truth about the extreme, life-threatening dangers unhoused people face, especially women. By minimizing these disappearances, the study preserved a narrative of homelessness that’s sanitized, palatable, and easy for policymakers and donors to ignore.

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Homelessness as Patriarchal Protection Racket

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: homelessness is not just poverty or policy failure; it’s a system of patriarchal control. It targets women, impoverishes them, and keeps them on the knife edge of survival so they are forced to depend on men or patriarchal institutions for protection. The ever-present threat of exposure, violence, or disappearance functions as a modern protection racket: comply, submit, or face lethal consequences. Men die too, but the design is to keep women afraid and enslaved.

This isn’t just a poor woman’s burden. My story proves it: by any measure, I am owed billions—built through my own work, vision, and brilliance. I created wealth, value, and systems far outside the norm, developing innovations that threatened entrenched power structures. Because I broke the machine—because I showed that a woman could build and own extraordinary wealth on her own terms—I am being punished. I’ve been targeted, robbed, silenced, and cast out. Now I sleep in a tent on hard ground, despite the billions I rightfully earned, because nothing threatens the patriarchal order more than a woman who doesn’t need a man’s “protection.”

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The Ever-Present Reality of Sexual Violence

For unhoused women, exposure isn’t the only weapon of control—sexual violence is constant, expected, and terrifyingly normalized. Men see a homeless woman as someone they can afford to rape, assuming her poverty makes her powerless. They invite us into their cars with offers of a few dollars for sex—or simply take what they want, believing our desperation strips us of rights, safety, or recourse. This predatory dynamic doesn’t haunt homeless men the same way; it’s a specific, gendered violence that keeps women compliant, silent, and trapped in the patriarchal protection racket. It’s not just about surviving the night—it’s about surviving relentless, targeted sexual violence.

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The Scam of Patriarchal “Protection”

Men love to tell women they’re protecting us—but that promise is a racket. It’s a scam. The threat is manufactured, the danger enforced, so that their “protection” becomes the only option for survival. And nowhere is this clearer than in the lethal danger of exposure. The fact that a woman without shelter can die in hours proves that the threat is real and ever-present—yet society calls it bad luck instead of the engineered terror it is.

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The Real Threat—and the Real Cover-Up

A woman can die without shelter—quickly, predictably, and horribly—while the very real threat of exposure is bizarrely hidden from the public. That’s how the patriarchy keeps its protection racket alive. Until we name patriarchy as the root, and exposure and sexual violence as its weapons, we will never break this deadly cycle.

It’s this brutal reality—that many men want easy, low-cost access to women’s bodies—that makes patriarchy so fiercely defended. Many will hold on to it with their last dying breath, because the system promises them the ability to force or pressure women into sex, or to exploit our poverty and vulnerability to keep the cost of access low. This isn’t just about individual cruelty; it’s the foundational bargain of patriarchy. And until we name it, expose it, and destroy it, they will keep the machine alive—no matter how many women it kills.