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Content warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of domestic violence. If you are experiencing violence and need help, go to , call (800) 799-7233 or text “start� to 88788.

Just as physical traits carried through the generations, so did the patterns of domestic violence each suffered.

In Jessie’s experience, the cycle of abuse led to a life of homelessness — a trend that a Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism survey found to be common among women surveyed in Pacific Northwest homeless shelters. The 150 surveys were conducted at women’s shelters in Salem, Oregon, about 25 miles north of Albany and Corvallis, as well as nine other shelters located throughout the Pacific Northwest. In 2024, Oregon ranked fourth in the nation for the rate of people experiencing homelessness per 10,000 people and it had the sixth-highest rate of female homelessness in the country, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. In this report, Lee Enterprises omits full names of domestic violence victims to protect their safety and identity. 

Jessie said men hit her mother because she drank too much — because she must have done something to deserve it, she once thought. The abuse her mom suffered came at the hands of Jessie’s own dad, her mother's boyfriend and countless other men without names worth remembering. Jessie witnessed it all.

It took decades to understand her mother never deserved the abuse, she said. Her mom drank to make the flood of pain hurt less.

Jessie’s early experiences catapulted her into a life of instability — leaving home early to avoid the violence, two teen pregnancies, a string of abusive relationships and then years of homelessness once she fled for the final time.

Among women experiencing homelessness, Jessie’s story doesn’t exist in a silo. 

Of those surveyed, 67% said domestic violence caused homelessness at some point in their lives, and 49% said it caused their current situation. Experts believe even those numbers may be on the low side.

Ashley Ann Crook, a domestic violence mentor at Oregon nonprofit Raphael House, said it can take time for women to understand the abuse they suffered contributed to their homelessness. Many resist thinking of themselves as victims while others are wary of reporting the brutality.

Despite the high number of domestic abuse incidents leading to women’s housing instability, the homeless services system is largely built for men, forcing many women to choose between violence or the street.

In the forested city of Portland, Oregon, where women’s and queer rights, spaces and movements are more prevalent than in other pockets of America, safety is still hard to find. Of the 2,934 shelter beds in Multnomah County, less than 7.6% solely serve women despite women accounting for at least 31% of the homeless population in that area. Those numbers also are likely imperfect because unhoused women are often more challenging to tally as they tend to hide for protection, experts say.

Despite homelessness and violence rising throughout the country, the federal government last year cut funding for domestic violence support services by 40%.

The 1984 Victims of Crime Act, underwritten by the Crime Victims Fund, helps pay for domestic violence shelters, crisis hotline calls, supportive court advocates and other resources. Congress cut nearly $600 million from the fund this fiscal year, capping it at $1.35 billion, as its reserves dwindled.

Some states, including Oregon, stepped in to fill that gap.

Oregon’s legislative emergency board allocated $3.5 million to ensure certain domestic violence programs wouldn’t buckle under the reduced federal funds. Those funds will float the state through the end of their two-year fiscal cycle on June 30, 2025, said Shannon Sivell, spokesperson for Oregon’s Crime Victim and Survivor Services Division.

For the 2025-2027 fiscal cycle, $18.5 million is needed from the state to fill the federal gap, said Sybil Hebb, Oregon Law Center’s policy director. This is on top of a gap in state funding stemming from a one-time allocation of $22 million for domestic violence and sexual assault related programs that offer community based and culturally-specific shelter beds that must be renewed to ensure current services remain constant, Hebb said.

Anticipating continued reduced funds, Sivell said Oregon’s Department of Justice will request ongoing investment from the state legislature for their next biennium.

States across the country face the same challenges, said Melina Milazzo, public policy director at the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

“The (fund) grants to nearly 6,500 victim service providers, like domestic violence shelters, who in turn provide lifesaving services to millions of survivors every year,� she said. “Drastic cuts to VOCA are forcing victim service programs to reduce or eliminate services, lay off staff and, in some cases, close their doors.�

Jessie's escape

Jessie recalls words her mother shared about escaping the nightmare at home. Her mom said when women are serious about fleeing, they leave with nothing but their children and purses.

She learned it wasn’t that easy.

Her mom called it “going on tilt� when Jessie's dad would snap, turning into a violent version of himself. Jessie’s mom would grab her, throw on her shoes and sprint to the car. They would sleep in their church parking lot or pay for a hotel if cash was plentiful. They would drive home the next morning for Jessie to get ready for school.

“At the time, I always thought we were just going for a drive,� Jessie said. “I thought if we were really going to leave, we would have packed up and grabbed all our stuff. But we always would go back a day or two later. I never realized all those times she never planned to go back. Now I see she had the intention of staying gone, but it was hard.�

Jessie grew up in Reno, Nevada, and had many homes: Hotels. Apartments. The street. Shelters. Friends’ homes. Family couches. Whatever was safest yet affordable.

Often, Jessie’s childhood was not safe, and the domino effect of generational violence was unyielding.

Of the homeless women surveyed for this report, 62% said they witnessed or experienced domestic violence during childhood and 35% said they experienced homelessness as a child.

Housing women is an obvious move to end the cycle if only there was enough funding. When housing is not an immediate option, shelter, supportive services, trauma-trained workers and believing women when they report abuse can save lives in the meantime, said Crook.

Jessie would like to think her mother, who has since died, eventually broke free from abuse, though she doesn’t know if that’s true.

It took Jessie three attempts to leave her own abusive partner. In the spring of 2011, she achieved her “Freedom Day,� which is like a birthday, but better, she said.

She and her longtime boyfriend lived in Tigard, Oregon, a tree-lined suburb of Portland. In the months leading up to her final escape, there were many opportunities for people with power to help her, but they didn’t.

She was admitted to emergency rooms multiple times for injuries caused by the beatings. Police continuously responded to their home when neighbors reported the overheard violence. But doctors, nurses, police — no one told Jessie domestic violence shelters existed. No one told her she could live another life.

“That is the norm — police and hospital workers not offering services, or they don’t believe the survivor or take it seriously enough,� said Crook, the domestic violence advocate. “At hospitals, when women are treated for injuries caused by abuse, often workers won’t even ask the abuser to leave the room while asking about the injuries.�

Crook teaches nurses-in-training about signs of abuse, how to interact with victims and what services are available. She is often shocked at the number of health care workers who don’t realize they are mandatory reporters and haven’t previously received proper training.

While 55% of the homeless women surveyed by Lee said they reported the violence to police, 60% said police were unhelpful, often leaving without understanding the true situation and sometimes even arresting the victim instead of the abuser.

Oregon is one of 27 states that require at least one person to be arrested during a domestic dispute, though police are often not regularly trained to decipher the complexity of those situations, said David Martin, a prosecutor in King County, Washington, which neighbors Oregon to the north.

During a prior abusive relationship in Nevada, another mandatory arrest state, Jessie was arrested because she admitted she hit her partner as he was choked the life out of her, she said. Her abuser denied the choking, so she was arrested and the charge on her record made obtaining housing even more difficult.

Martin helped start one of the first domestic violence deflection programs for women who were charged for defending themselves in abusive situations. His office worked on 400 cases in 2024, he said.

At Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, the women’s prison that serves the Portland area, 65% of the women experienced some sort of domestic violence prior to incarceration, according to an Oregon Justice Resource Center study.

“One of the main drivers of women’s exposure to the criminal justice system is involvement with domestic violence, sexual abuse and trafficking,� Martin said. “Law enforcement doesn’t get a lot of training in domestic violence response. And having to make decisions in a chaotic situation with little information, usually in the middle of the night, and dealing with offenders who are especially manipulative can lead to the wrong person being arrested, especially in mandatory arrest states.�

Of the women surveyed by the Lee Public Service Journalism team, 25% said they believe they were previously arrested for defending themselves from their partner’s violence.

Martin said prosecutors need to look at someone’s prior victimization when considering whether to charge a victim.

In Oregon, Jessie attempted to flee on her own a few times.

She made it to the Tigard Transit Center once but realized she had no one to call. She had become isolated, states away from her friends and family. With nowhere to go, she sat on a bench until her abuser arrived to take her back to their shared apartment.

Another time, Jessie said, he dragged her back up their stairs while she kicked and screamed after he caught her trying to slip away.

Her final escape in 2011 was frantic. As rain poured down midday, she sprinted barefoot from their home. She screamed for help as she ran until she came to a nearby shopping center parking lot where police responded. Most times, officers did nothing in her experience. This time was different. One of the responding cops was an older man who acknowledged driving away meant more harm to come for her, she said.

“He said he was going to call in and ask for special permission to give me a transport somewhere,� Jessie recalled. “He said I just had to have a place to go.�

For all she had been through, Jessie’s escape was not the new opportunity she hoped it would be. It was the start of new violence that would span another four years as she navigated homelessness.

No rest for victims

Jessie told the officer to drive her to an acquaintance she thought might be sympathetic to her story.

She found momentary solace at the woman’s door. She stayed there for a few nights but knew her boyfriend would find her. The woman, who was a sex worker, offered to let Jessie stay in the hotel rooms she booked for work. This way, Jessie’s location constantly changed.

The complicated dance of hotel rooms only lasted so long. Eventually it shifted to a dance of unsheltered homelessness, friends’ couches and scraping together change to pay for her own motel rooms.

When staying with certain acquaintances, men saw her as their property since they did her a favor, she said. Even with a roof overhead, she gave up sleep to prevent unwanted touching.

Her safest option was walking all night, fueled by uppers that would allow her to pull off the unfathomable task of staying alive and unharmed.

Often, there are no safe places for women to go: 57% of women surveyed by the Lee Public Service Journalism Team said they were assaulted while experiencing homelessness.

And of the women who stayed at large, co-ed shelters, 38% said male guests harassed or assaulted them.

During the day, Jessie would sometimes sleep on Portland’s MAX light-rail train, taking it back and forth from Portland International Airport to the last stop in suburban Hillsboro, which was about a two-hour trip each way.

These days, Tri-Met security is more aggressive, she said, kicking many sleepers off of trains. Jessie thinks that was the only benefit of being a small woman — perhaps they felt sorry for her.

Aside from sleepless nights, it would have been near impossible for Jessie to keep a job with inconsistent showers, dirty clothes, lack of transportation and a battery-dead phone.

The flexibility of sex work made sense. She saved money while she searched for apartments.

She put her name on affordable housing waitlists hoping for a temporary rent subsidy to bridge her back into a stable life. It didn’t work out.

Instead, she began lying on apartment applications, citing fake jobs, a fake salary and fake references. She said she knew once she had the stability of a home, she could easily increase her income — and she did.

Even women who snag a safe shelter bed say they struggle to access support services needed to get housing. Of those surveyed who stayed in shelters, 84% said they did not receive a rent subsidy; 64% said they did not get assigned a caseworker, and 46% said they needed — but did not get — access to mental health services.

At Simonka Place, a transitional women’s shelter in the heart of Oregon, about 25 miles north of Albany and Corvallis, the amount of time guests stay has stretched longer in recent years because it can take single women two to seven years to move off a housing waitlist, said Kathy Smith, the nonprofit’s director. For women with children, the process typically moves faster. In the meantime, Smith typically turns away 30 women and 20 children a month on average because they are at capacity.

Local workers attribute the shelter bubble to a lack of flexible local and state housing funds. Instead of helping victims before they become homeless, many funding pots require women to be homeless before qualifying for assistance, unnecessarily pushing many more women to shelter doorsteps.

And it can take weeks of calling every day before a shelter bed is available.

“We now have more housing resources than we ever had before, but we have to do more education with community leaders and funders about the impact of domestic violence,� said Melissa Erlbaum, director of Clackamas Women’s Services in Oregon. “Domestic violence survivors don’t fit neatly into their funding buckets. They may not be literally homeless, but they may be fleeing violence or couch surfing.�

Erlbaum said some local and federal funds can now be used for domestic violence victims to prevent their homelessness thanks to advocacy work but with each new funding stream that emerges, the advocacy and education to include victims begins again.

Those funds are integral because financial abuse is often layered atop the bruises.

That can include partners forbidding women from working, poor performance at work because of the impacts of abuse, abusers withholding shared money and poor credit scores or eviction records caused by abusers’ poor money practices and violent fits, Erlbaum said.

“We don’t want to ask someone to stay a night on the street just to access housing when they are being harmed every day in their home,� Erlbaum said.

Healing the trauma

Jessie moved into her own apartment eight years ago and now lives with her current partner and their pit bull, Kisses.

She believes she was right — lying on apartment applications about her income gave her the stability needed to save money and make positive progress in life. She is now a program coordinator at a women’s and gender-queer day center that largely serves people experiencing homelessness and poverty. She still does sex work on the side but only when she wants to. And with the help of her nonprofit employer, she is taking accounting classes at a nearby community college.

Jessie said years of homelessness and abuse made her an empathetic and knowledgeable advocate. But if some of the most critical domestic violence resources existed when she needed them, maybe she wouldn’t have suffered so much hurt.

Hebb, Oregon Law Center’s policy director, is preparing to advocate during Oregon’s legislative session starting in January on nearly every system failure that Jessie encountered in her life. The policy asks are needed throughout the country, she said.

The law center’s top domestic violence priority is stability for shelter and advocacy services as well as flexible funding for rent assistance. Access to safe, affordable and stable housing continues to be the top need identified by survivors across the state, she said. 

Increased funding for adequate staffing is also needed to support women who are accessing those services. Many nonprofits are forced to pay workers wages that do not meet housing costs due to tight state and local contracts, Hebb said.

System-wide improvement are needed as well — better support for women in the legal, criminal justice, first responder and hospital systems. The people intervening and providing help should know how to identify abuse and how to work with victims, Hebb said. This requires more training for workers across all systems, she said.

After navigating every possible barrier to safety, Jessie can only now talk about the events of her life. Her memories are confusing, tangling passion with pain. Jessie was so in love. Butterflies filled her belly. She was so happy — until she wasn’t.

That early happiness blinded her from the man he really was, she said. He was the man who, when they arrived at their new apartment in Portland after moving from Reno, rammed a plastic storage bin full of DVDs into her pregnant stomach so hard it caused a violent hematoma that led to a necessary late-term abortion to save her own life. She still blames him for the death of her third child.

She remembers thinking if he hurt her, it must be because she deserved it. At times, she didn’t even know where all her bruises came from. She wishes someone had taught her what abuse was and how she deserved to be treated. For someone who witnessed generational abuse, that knowledge doesn’t come naturally.

“I believed you the day you told me you loved me … I believed you the day you said I was nothing,� she wrote in an unsent letter to him. “I trusted … when you told me we would have a better life in Portland, just as I did when you told me that my family didn’t love me or want me around anymore and that I was lucky you were willing to have me.�

Education in schools and early intervention are two big funding goals local and national leaders want state and federal systems would focus on. Allison Wilson, director of the Center for Advocacy, Prevention and Education which focuses on intimate partner violence research at Oregon State University in Corvallis, said ending generational domestic violence starts with education at the grade school level and college levels.

Maybe if someone told Jessie she deserved love without hurt, the hurt wouldn’t have lasted so long. The violence could have not spanned a lifetime.

And perhaps she never would have been homeless.

Nicole Hayden is an investigative journalist on the Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team. Do you have a domestic violence, restraining order, housing or related legal story you believe needs to be investigated? Contact Nicole at Nicole.Hayden@lee.net.