The Homeless Person in Contemporary Society by Cameron Parsell

Author:Cameron Parsell [Parsell, Cameron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367606978
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Researcher: Now you said you’ve been in [homeless shelter] a few times, is that right?

Tanya: Yeah, quite a bit over the years because I’ve been homeless on and off for years. I don’t have much family support. My mother’s dead, but she wasn’t all that great to me in a way. I’ve been homeless a lot and I’ve ended up here… I never find that I can get it together here. It’s just a never-ending cycle somehow to poverty that keeps me trapped. I gamble to try and make more money to get out of the poo

Ox: Well I’ve had a 30 year amphetamine habit and I thought if I get down to Melbourne I might be able to bump that cycle, so I did.

Researcher: So you’re clean now?

Ox: Yeah, over 10 years… Basically, I’m on antipsychotics for paranoid schizophrenia, for using powders for so many years. I had my first needle at, I think it was, 12 ½… I got bashed as a child since I was around about three or four years of age and it just progressed and progressed and then I became angry and ended up getting all tattoos and stuff thinking they’re [makes growling sound]. Used to fight people, went to jail for over ten years.

Researcher: In one stretch?

Ox: Yeah

People did not see homelessness as part of their identity because homelessness occurred as part and parcel of their lives, where significant problems were the norm. Homelessness was never spoken about as a significant event or turning point that was memorable, that they saw as constituting a part of who they were. Homelessness was a continuation of deprivation and things going wrong. It was extremely rare that people who had experienced long-term homelessness described positive childhoods and family relationships and then an entry into homelessness in later life. It was a reoccurring theme, however, for people to struggle to pinpoint their entry into homelessness because they would describe childhood events and traumas that they likened to feeling homeless, for example, going into the child protection system, being abused, and being alone.

The people in my research who have experienced long-term homelessness have predictable biographies. Although the media and advocacy groups like to draw on the idea of two pay cheques away from homelessness and the related notion of homelessness can happen to anyone, the research with people who spend much of their adult lives moving between rough sleeping and homeless accommodation suggests that the early signs of homelessness are evident in childhood and that they are not distributed evenly through the population. The predictable biographies characterised by exclusion that I have identified reflect the evidence from longitudinal studies from the United Kingdom, demonstrating that the risk of homelessness is not evenly distributed among the population. Rather, homelessness in adulthood is often precipitated by childhood poverty and its early life consequences (Bramley and Fitzpatrick 2018; Fitzpatrick, Bramley, and Johnsen 2013).

The biographies of homeless people presented in this book help us understand why homelessness is not the significant life event or defining element for their senses of self.

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