Changing the Way People Talk About Homelessness
Homelessness is a problem, not the people living through it. This is a fact that many people don’t seem to realise. Nobody enjoys the insecurity that comes from sleeping rough. Nobody likes the fact that they need to ask for help or that they are constantly forced to have to carry everything they own. But too many people see ‘them’ as an inconvenience.
Take, for example, the announcements you hear on the Underground:
“There are beggars and buskers operating on this train, please do not encourage their presence by supporting them’.
It would be silly to argue that seeing three or four people, in succession, on one journey asking for money isn’t, at times, frustrating for those travelling. But it is a much more frustrating situation for the people asking than the people ignoring them, and this is a symptom of a much bigger problem, both for the person begging and society as a whole.
A quick search on Google found this Reddit post.
This person is asking the right question but looking at it from the wrong perspective. They seem to think that begging ‘professionally’ is a dream career for some people. They look at the unsightly inconvenience it is apparently causing themselves and others, and instead of looking at a way to fight against the larger problem, they want a way to sweep the people begging under a rug.
It seems incredible that their solution would be to have legal action taken against individuals asking for money on the tube. Because what would arresting them really accomplish? At best any money they have would be spent on a fine and they would start over again, but at worst they would enter the criminal system.
Those with the Most Work the Hardest
There is a common view that people with the most are the hardest workers, and so people with nothing must be lazy. This is an idea that is so easy to dispel, but many refuse to look at it logically. A great example of this, particularly in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, is nurses. They work long, hard hours and yet will never earn a tenth of a celebrity speaker’s fee, for example.
Another example is Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. It was recently projected that in six years he will become the world’s first trillionaire. But it is patently untrue that he has worked billions of times harder than the warehouse workers, drivers and thousands of others that he employs. We aren’t arguing for wealth grabs, but the disparity is impossible to deny.
All of this often leads to the mistaken conflation that every person you see begging is lazy, has failed in some way, with some people even believing they ‘deserve’ their plight (‘he must have done x or decided to do x). People end up with the incorrect assumption that anyone who begs is homeless, and therefore, all homeless people beg. This only adds to the negative image that many people already have of people experiencing homelessness and the misinformation that many people already believe about rough sleepers. According to a study by Crisis, around one in five people begging in the UK aren’t homeless.
On the whole, many people who sleep rough have never begged, nor do they beg regularly. At Street Storage we work with people who are experiencing homelessness for a variety of reasons, from eviction, to family breakdown alongside mental ill health to people simply down on their luck. But almost all our clients are looking for employment or actively in it.
People Experiencing Homelessness
At Street Storage we prefer the term ‘people experiencing homelessness’ rather than ‘homeless people’. It is a phase, not a whole-person identity, although of course we have clients and friends who choose to identify with this part of their being and campaign on behalf of their community through having a unique perspective on the issue.
Changing the way that people talk about people experiencing homelessness is the first step to changing the way our society views them. This might seem far-fetched, but there is a precedent.
In the 1980s 10% of Portugal’s population were heroin users. One of the ways the country reduced this staggering figure was to make a concerted effort to stop the use of pejorative terms like ‘druggy’. This change in wording helped to humanise the people who had become addicted.
This was only one in a list of things Portugal did to tackle their drug problem, including the decriminalisation of drugs and broader health and social policies. But as the saying goes, every little helps.
This could be the same for homelessness. Just changing a few words won’t solve our country’s rising homeless problem. A lot needs to be done for those who find themselves experiencing homelessness, but a more empathetic society is a good first step.
By identifying 'people experiencing homelessness' as exactly that - people - they might not be so easily conflated with people who beg, drug users, victims or perpetrators of crime, and the negativity towards directed towards them will slowly shift towards an attitude of compassion and solidarity towards individuals.
If the term ‘people experiencing homelessness’ became more common, then it would make people stop and think more. Why are they experiencing homelessness? What could be done to help them out of the situation? What could I do to help?
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