Learning from the homeless

07 August 2014

To be homeless would be one of our worst nightmares. To have to ask ourselves where we would sleep tonight, to have nothing on which to cook, no postal address, no answer to give to people who ask us where we live, nowhere to keep our bodies and our possessions safe, no confidence that we can keep our family together — we just don’t want to go there.

So Homeless Persons' Week, celebrated this week, creeps up on us like a cane toad. We don’t want to know about it, nor even think about it.

Yet many people in our society are homeless, and the threat of having nowhere to live hangs over even more people. Over forty percent of prisoners can expect to be homeless when they leave jail, for example. And many vulnerable young people have no stable home life, live in abusive situations, are isolated or suffer from mental illness. So it is decent to keep homeless people in mind.

Homeless Persons' Week is even more topical this year because the young people in risk of homelessness are precisely those who under new government proposals will lose benefits, will be constrained to make forty applications each month to seek work and will be obliged to do community work. Charity groups are already reporting an increase in young people living on the streets. These restrictions on support mean that more young people will join them. Although there may be arguments for this punitive regime in the case of the relatively small group of people who simply do not want to work, its application to include vulnerable young people will be harmful. It is easy to see why this should be so.

If you are young, living precariously on the edge of homelessness you have little space to reflect on your life. You must focus on survival. Nor do you have the stability you need in order to benefit from education or work. The things that you need to keep you connected with society – work, a bank account, a driving license – are beyond your reach. You are never far from losing your health, your self-confidence and your self-esteem.

It will not help if you are burdened with filling in forms to apply for jobs that do not exist and required to meet obligations you are not capable of, and then are stigmatised as work-shy, bludgers, leaners and not lifters, and

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Learning from the homeless

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