6Lived experiences of homelessness
This chapter highlights the diverse ‘voices’ of service users and people affected by homelessness, including their perceptions of the effectiveness of social work policies and services. I commence this chapter by presenting my original research on the everyday lived experiences of homelessness, from the perspectives of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal male and female service users in Adelaide, South Australia (Zufferey and Kerr, 2004). Although this research was not initially designed and analysed from an intersectional approach, I centred the voices of people who experienced homelessness, intersected two categories of difference and analysed gendered and race relations. In this chapter I also discuss my research projects on home and homelessness focusing on sexuality, migration, different ethnicities, classes, genders and ages. I draw on insights from research literature about gendered violence and women’s homelessness, as well as children’s and young people’s perspectives of homelessness, as they intersect with gender, race and ethnicity. I argue that the voices of the least powerful are often ignored or re-constructed for particular political purposes. Finally, I highlight service user-led evaluation research (Coltman et al., 2015) as the way forward, to further promote reflexive approaches to social work practice.
Homelessness is a significant and complicated social issue. Homelessness ‘stands as a challenge to widely held beliefs about opportunity and success’ and it highlights the importance of ‘structural obstacles and inequality’ in Western societies (Wasserman and Clair, 2010, p. 8). However, ‘homelessness is not a characteristic of people but rather a condition in which some people find themselves at some point in time’ (Blasi, 1990, p. 209). The perspectives of people who experience homelessness can offer insights into how to begin to think about homelessness in new ways, beyond simply providing solutions on how to end homelessness. They can offer alternative perspectives on policy and service responses to homelessness that acknowledge intersecting complexities and diversity. Wasserman and Clair (2010, p. 2) note that one of the most difficult social problems of our time is the ‘us–them dichotomy’ view of the world. For example, homelessness is a stigmatised social identity that is given meaning according to its conceptual distance from ‘the housing norm’ (Wasserman and Clair, 2010). Homogenous representations of and responses to homelessness can limit what can be thought and said about the issue, and dichotomous ways of seeing the world underlie social work practices that continue to maintain unequal power relations. These discourses and practices contribute to shaping the experiences and subjectivities of people experiencing homelessness (Bacchi, 2009; Zufferey, 2014, p. 8). Negative discourses and constructions of homelessness can have pathologising effects on the identities of service users. However, service users can also resist deleterious explanations about homelessness (Zufferey and Kerr, 2004).
In making visible diverse perspectives on homelessness, the concept is shown to be a ‘politically contested’ rather than objective reality (Fitzpatrick and Christian, 2006, p. 315; Jacobs et al., 1999; Zufferey and Chung, 2015). Whilst there is a widening policy and research understanding of homelessness as outlined in Chapters 3 and 4, few studies focus on intersections in subjective perspectives and embodied lived experiences. Intersectional approaches to homelessness can enable the deconstruction of how unequal social relations intersect and shape the subjectivities of men and women who are defined as homeless. However, I acknowledge that not all social relations that shape the lived experiences of homelessness can be addressed in the chapter. This chapter covers the perspectives of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal men and women in the Australian context, discusses service user resistances and identifications with negative discourses of homelessness, highlights diverse perspectives on race relations, explores gendered violence and women’s homelessness as it intersects with race and ethnic differences, mentions gender and sexuality, covers gender, ethnicity and age differences ranging from children in homeless shelters in the UK to older people in aged care facilities in Australia, and diverse experiences of home and homelessness, including refugees and migrant perspectives. When I reflected on what was missing in this chapter, I noticed that able-bodiedness or disability, nationalism and global-local geographical locations were not explored, which are among numerous other intersecting social locations that contribute to homelessness, and could have been included but were not. As Wasserman and Clair (2010, p. 4) learnt, there is a ‘wealth of knowledge on the street that had escaped most of society’, even social workers and social services.
The social dynamics of oppression and privilege incorporate a number of dimensions and present individuals (such as social workers) with access to resources and institutional power beyond the advantages of people who do not belong to these groups (Pease, 2010). My dilemmas in this chapter related to the questions: What identity categorisations do I privilege and what do I make invisible? How do I continue to construct and essentialise what inequalities do or do not matter? Who and what contributes to constituting who remains ‘at the margins’, such as homeless? Who decides who is privileged and who is oppressed? Who benefits from these constructions and decisions? These are difficult questions to answer, but obtaining the diverse perspectives of people being subjected to the identity category of ‘homeless’ goes some way to making visible the intersecting complexities and diversities of homelessness. As well, social work, with its commitment to social justice and human rights, is an ideal profession for responding to homelessness, in all its iterations. Such social work practice would involve ‘activism’ that occurs in dialogue with people who have lived experiences of the topics being studied, including service users (Yeatman, 1998).
When analysing a narrative life-interview of one female Bulgarian migrant in Vienna, political scientist Alice Ludvig (2006, p. 245) argues that it is impossible to take into account all significant differences in the intersectional approach. This one interview was completed over nine and a half hours, several weeks, in four sessions, between February and May 2005. She started with the open question and statement: ‘I am interested in your life-story. Please tell me everything that comes to your mind and that you would like to tell’ (Ludvig, 2006, p. 250). Ludvig then analysed the woman’s ‘self-positioning in a specific setting in time and place’, to examine their effects on the ‘particularities’ of gender, class and ethnicity (Ludvig, 2006, p. 251), providing insights into the ways in which one single actor is structurally positioned. This qualitative in-depth process of gathering life narratives enables the exploration of how and what diverse aspects of an individual’s life and identity intersect. She then examined this narrative more structurally, by asking the question: ‘What does this interview tell us about the politico-social structures in Austria?’ (Ludvig, 2006, p. 250). This approach resonates with the qualitative research that I have undertaken in Australia that used narrative interviews to gather diverse perspectives of home and homelessness, including the experiences of service users (Zufferey and Kerr, 2004; Zufferey, 2015).
Since 2001, I have researched home and homelessness in numerous research projects. I have already discussed four of these research projects in Chapter 3 (Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014; Zufferey and Chung, 2015; Zufferey, 2015), including our recent study on gendered violence (Zufferey et al., 2016). In Chapter 5, I presented my research on the perspectives of social workers. This chapter particularly discusses the narratives of people who experienced homelessness (Zufferey and Kerr, 2004), briefly mentions findings from our research on ageing and sexuality (Rowntree and Zufferey, 2015) and further explores my intersectional research on the experiences of home and homelessness (as mentioned in Chapter 3), focusing on refugee, migration and middle-class narratives of home (Zufferey, 2015).
Prior to becoming an academic, I worked as a social work practitioner in different fields of practice and geographical locations. I worked in remote Western Australia where my client group was primarily Aboriginal families and communities, in London, UK in the fields of aged care and disability, and in Adelaide, South Australia, with people who experienced homelessness and mental illness. This last area of work led to my interest in researching diverse experiences of homelessness. Influenced by sociological ethnographic studies that examined the identity talk of people who experience homelessness (Snow and Anderson, 1987; 1993; Snow et al., 2007), the research I discuss next was my MSW research that gathered nine stories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal men and women in Adelaide, South Australia. I found that whilst people have been identified and categorised as being ‘homeless’ by social workers and policy makers, they often did not identify themselves as ‘homeless’ (Zufferey and Kerr, 2004). The sample comprised four women and five men, four being of Aboriginal background (three women and one man), four of non-Aboriginal background and one man of European Australian background. Their ages ranged between 23 and 73, and the duration of their homelessness had lasted between six weeks to 20 years. All except for one young woman had experienced ‘sleeping rough’. This chapter revisits some of the findings of this study that have also been published elsewhere in different detail (see Zufferey and Kerr, 2004). To contextualise the study, I emphasise literature about the effects of colonisation and then discuss how homelessness affected people’s subjectivities.
In Australia, Aboriginal people make up 3 per cent of the Australian population but are over 20 per cent of the homeless population. These statistics point to the need to examine homelessness from the perspectives of Aboriginal people, to develop a multilayered analysis that is inclusive of the historical effects of racism, Indigenous dispossession and colonisation (Briskman, 2003; Green and Baldry, 2008, p. 389). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are overrepresented in the Australian homelessness statistics, more likely to be sleeping rough, in improvised and overcrowded dwellings and less likely to be homeowners (AIHW, 2011). Aboriginal Australians are the most disadvantaged group in Australia on a wide range of socio-economic indicators such as health, income, education, employment and housing. They are at increasing risk of being defined as ‘homeless’ and of feeling ‘spiritually homeless’, in the context of the history of colonisation and their dispossession from their land and ‘sense of belonging, home and place’ (Keys Young, 1998; Moreton-Robinson, 2003, p. 23; Moreton-Robinson, 2009).
The disempowering effects of colonisation can also be found in other countries such as Canada and the USA. Hulko (2015, p. 85) has gathered the perspectives of First Nation Elders about living with dementia using intersectionality, and argued the importance of co-sharing research findings in ways that ‘position members of equity seeking groups as meaning makers and knowledge creators’, to influence social change. Globally, post-colonial studies examine the effects of colonising practices that marginalise large groups of people on the basis of ethnicity, gender and class, to name a few (Young, 2003). In my research, the perspectives of colonised peoples from Aboriginal Australian cultural backgrounds are given particular attention. These alternative perspectives can provide social workers with ways to unsettle dominant Westernised assumptions about policy and practice responses to homelessness (Zufferey and Chung, 2015).
In the context of countries that have been colonised, Aboriginal people are disadvantaged by colonial histories and government policies that removed them from their lands, and removed children from their families. Indeed, people were (and still are) ‘made homeless’ by government policies (Lester, 1999, p. 18). Government policies have been constructed by people in power (such as social workers), with particular privileges, based on their membership of a particular dominant group. Privilege is invisible. The privileged groups have the power to determine social norms, naturalise privilege and the sense of entitlement that accompanies it (Pease, 2010). Social workers have directly participated in these social interventions related to the removal of children and creation of homelessness. I have previously reflected on my involvement in child protection services as an example of how current ‘child protection’ policies and legislation are biased in favour of white people who have the invisible power and privilege to create policy and legislation that is not always culturally relevant for Aboriginal communities (Walter et al., 2011; Zufferey, 2013).
The effects of ‘being stolen’ from one’s country, land, community and family has disempowering, intergenerational effects on people’s lives, increasing the risks of experiencing and feeling ‘homeless’:
I just get angry … you got rich from our country, you stole it from us. You stole my family, you stolen me from my family, which in turn has affected my children and my grandchildren. It’s not just my children … I’ve got my grandchildren in foster care … my little ones that are stolen within the system. Just like I was. That’s what keeps me going [advocating against the system].
(Aboriginal woman, aged 43)
As Pease (2010, p. 109) argues, ‘people’s perceptions of the world are influenced by their personal biographies and social location’. This quote refers to Stolen Generation/s policies that occurred in the context of race and class privileges of the dominant colonising group, which relates to ‘who decides’ and ‘who benefits’ from policy constructions and decisions (see Zufferey, 2013 for more details). The power dynamics and social injustices of these colonising practices that ‘stole’ Aboriginal people’s land and families is repeated in intergenerational experiences of family members being ‘stolen’ by the child protection system. These foundational injustices are central to the Australian context of homelessness.
Next, I discuss how diverse experiences and perspectives on homelessness are constituted by resistances to dominant social work practices; complex feelings of being ‘degraded’, ‘unwanted’ as well as ‘lucky’; advocating for Aboriginal land rights, as well as challenging dichotomous constructions of ‘black and white’ issues through ‘streetie’ discourses.
Despite feeling disempowered by the responses of service systems, service users can also resist social work practices that ‘tell them what to do’. For example, two women of Aboriginal background explained that they would prefer to ‘sleep rough’ than be ‘told what to do’ by services:
I had untold people coming in and saying ‘right we are going to do this … we are going to do that’. I’m sitting there going … hang on I’m here you know! And then that is when I get up and run away and go and sleep on the streets, cause I found it better out there. At least I had a sense of freedom. No-one was telling me what to do.
(Aboriginal woman, aged 45)
Similarly, ‘I would rather stay on the streets than go to a place where I am told when I’m allowed to go out and when I am not’ (Aboriginal woman, aged 43).
The quotes above show that these two Aboriginal women do not find current homelessness service approaches respectful or self-determining. They imply that collaborative and strengths-based social work practices would improve engagement with potential service users and more positively respond to people who are ‘sleeping rough’ (see also Zufferey and Kerr, 2004, p. 350). ‘One size fits all’ policy responses and practices within services are often influenced by medical and scientific discourses that can construct deficit and homogenous categories to represent people who experience homelessness (Zufferey and Kerr, 2004). An intersectional social work approach, on the other hand, acknowledges the effects of intersecting social injustices and power relations that can contribute to processes of social marginalisation and social exclusion.
Whilst service users can resist social work interventions in their lives, negative representations of ‘homeless people’ can, nonetheless, constitute their subjectivities. For example, people who experience homelessness can have an overwhelming feeling that they are being ‘put down’ or excluded from society, as illustrated in the following two quotes from older men who have experienced homelessness. This can be a feeling of being degraded into ‘a nothingness’: ‘It makes you feel degraded and low and nothingness. I am a nothingness. I am being put down by society. I am useless. I am no good’ (non-Aboriginal man, aged 50). In the next quote similar sentiments are described as an ‘unwanted complex’ with a long history, likely tracing back to childhood experiences: ‘You feel unwanted, unloved, no-one wants a drunk do they? … resenting authority, in and out of jail, locking me up and unwanted, a problem of unwantedness … a sort of unwanted complex’ (non-Aboriginal man, aged 73). These feelings of being unwanted or excluded can then lead to feelings of self-blame for being in a homeless predicament: ‘It [homelessness] makes you think what could have been … no-one else to blame but yourself’ (Aboriginal man, aged 50). This sentiment illustrates the effects of negative societal representations and approaches to homelessness that are situated within broader Western individualist, neoliberal discourses about social problems, emphasising individual self-interest and moral responsibility for one’s own problems (Harris, 2003; Zufferey and Kerr, 2004; Jamrozik, 2005; Gordon and Zufferey, 2013).
The morally ascribed responsibility for oneself can constitute the subjectivities of people who experience homelessness and are in turn, deployed to describe the subjectivities of ‘other’ homeless people. This process is evident in a quote by one of the young women who argued that some people are homeless and ‘in the shit because they are shit … no desire to pull themselves out of their situation’ (non-Aboriginal woman, aged 23). In contrast, another service user shifted the responsibilities for homelessness from individuals to society: ‘Society has admitted they are incompetent; they can’t solve this problem of homelessness. They are instigators of homelessness in the first place, the government body, the bureaucrats’ (non-Aboriginal man, aged 50). In some circumstances, people blame themselves (and other individuals) for being homeless but in other circumstances, the same individuals may blame society. This contradictory attitude highlights the complexities of diverse perspectives on homelessness, which is conceived as being both an individual and community responsibility (see also Zufferey and Kerr, 2004, pp. 347–348). Expanding on this analysis, an intersectional approach can highlight how social structures, individual subjectivities and discursive representations of social problems can variously shape perspectives and experiences of homelessness.
To emphasise broader concerns about society, policies and social work practice, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal advocates drew on the notion of citizenship: ‘We are homeless Australian citizens, not scum, not junkies’ (non-Aboriginal man, aged 50). In particular, Aboriginal people in Australia were not considered ‘citizens’ with equal rights and self-determination: ‘we weren’t citizens of this country. Welfare, or the Department, anyone had the right to walk in and take us away’ (recounting the effects of the Stolen Generation/s from an Aboriginal Australian/Indigenous perspective, Lester, 1999, p. 18). As well as being racialised, citizenship is historically, politically and conceptually gendered (Lister, 2003). One woman expressed this as ‘being treated as lesser beings’: ‘That is what it comes down to … God’s a man and women are treated as lesser beings … it’s all based on a patriarchal God’ (recounting the effects of gender from the perspective of a 23-year-old non-Aboriginal woman). Despite these more negative assertions, people who experienced homelessness also felt ‘lucky’, more knowledgeable about ‘the other side of life’ or the ‘other reality’ of homelessness.
Two women of different ages and cultural backgrounds expressed their feelings of being ‘blessed’, ‘lucky’ and ‘stronger’ to have experienced homelessness:
I really respect all the streeties … it’s made me stronger … it’s made me appreciate little things … I feel blessed that I have been able to experience that life … cause I know that I can’t judge, I won’t judge, how can I judge?
(Aboriginal woman, aged 43)
This quote illustrated a respect for the collective named as ‘streeties’. As evident in the quote below, social workers are also perceived to have knowledge about this ‘other side’ of life:
I am lucky actually. I know the other side. I know this side and I am lucky to have that knowledge … I consider myself to have more knowledge on life than these people who have gone to university and got a job … unless they become social workers … they’ll never see it … they’ll just live their whole life, just walk past people in the street and look down on them.
(non-Aboriginal woman, aged 23)
These standpoints resonate with the findings of Boydell et al.’s (2000, p. 8) Canadian study into adult shelter users, who reported that homelessness ‘gave them a deeper understanding of life and its meaning’. An intersectional social work approach can contribute to mutually co-constructed meanings and experiences of homelessness, depending on the social contexts and categories of difference being examined by the researcher.
When exploring racism, Aboriginal participants did name its oppressive effects. The historical connection to land was emphasised by Aboriginal people who were, at the time of the interviews, being ‘moved on’ from inner city locations, during the introduction of dry zone legislation in Adelaide, South Australia (see also Zufferey and Kerr, 2004). As one Aboriginal woman said, the land ‘it is them’: ‘Find out whose land you’re really running your cars on. Whose land is this underneath all your little cement? This is Kaurna country [belongs to the local Aboriginal people]. It’s that mob. It is them’ (Aboriginal woman, aged 43). As well, inner city locations that were being gentrified were historical ‘meeting places’, as explained by this Aboriginal man: ‘If you go up to the city, that’s the first place you go to (Victoria Square). It’s a meeting place. My tribe the Ngarrindjeri tribe, it was our territory before’ (Aboriginal man, aged 50).
However, some Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women and men resisted dichotomous constructions of ‘black and white’ issues. When speaking about the ‘homeless culture’ or connections between people who are homeless (‘streeties’), the theme of connection and reciprocity with other ‘streeties’ was dominant. This attitude related to people who are homeless ‘helping each other out’, materially and emotionally (Zufferey, 2001; see also Zufferey and Kerr, 2004, p. 348). As one man said:
I am thinking of others, what their needs are … Everyone goes out with feelers and tries to get it [money, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, food] for the people, so it is like a network within itself … My day to day routine would be that, communicating with other people who are in the same situation as me, attending and caring for them, them attending and caring for others. It is a chain reaction and we are looking out for our needs.
(non-Aboriginal man, aged 50)
Like this non-Aboriginal man, other older men of Aboriginal cultural background also reported sharing their alcohol and drugs with other ‘streeties’, in the ‘chain reaction’ of ‘caring for others’.
The Aboriginal woman below stated her opinion that homelessness was not a ‘black and white’ issue:
Up town you will find it is not a black and white issue … white people are camping right next to nunga [Aboriginal] people … you get a lot of tribal people come here, to live with them you gotta be fairly tough. If you’re a streetie, you’re a streetie, it doesn’t matter. If someone robs you, well then you’ve got all the streeties you know. They look out for each other. Some of them don’t … some of them like want to just come and go … make their money [e.g. drug dealers].
(Aboriginal woman, aged 45)
Therefore, the feelings of solidarity with other people who experience homelessness (‘streeties’) can transcend unequal race relations and racial differences. However, not all ‘streeties’ ‘look out for each other’. This Aboriginal woman excludes ‘drug dealers’ from the ‘streetie’ collective, who are constructed as being predominantly self-interested.
These identification complexities in the perspectives of people who experience homelessness have also been found by American sociologists Wasserman and Clair (2010). They observed a man they called Carnell, who they labelled as ‘intelligent, articulate and clever’, trying to convince another man that ‘black and white don’t exist’ (Wasserman and Clair, 2010, p. 17). They observed that ‘while he did not have an academic vocabulary, as he talked, it was clear that his thoughts went beyond the I-don’t-see-color cliché to a deeply philosophical, social constructionist view of race and ethnicity’. For example, ‘What color are you?’ his debate partner challenged, ‘’cause I’m black.’ Carnell wouldn’t budge, ‘There is no black; they made that shit up’ (Carnell, in Wasserman and Clair, 2010, p. 17). However, they also noted that this social constructionist position on race relations is unusual.
In a different context, Larry Dillard recounts his experiences on the streets and prison, in Blauner’s (1990, p. 111) book, on stories from the civil rights movement in America. He speaks about ‘taking sides’: ‘The brothers stay together and we call that respect. Togetherness. Like, a brother, he don’t have no white friends. If he do, you’re a dead brother. You’re a D.B. White on black, two-tone. You on a side.’ The civil rights movement asserted the rights of citizens to political and social freedom and equality and thus, one had to take ‘a side’ against these racialised (and gendered) injustices. In the context of researching literal homelessness in New York, Passaro (2014) argued that gender, race and family status are culturally embedded moral and social locations that determined chances of exiting homelessness. She found that the persistently homeless ‘on the streets’ are overwhelmingly black men who tend to be excluded from the service system (Passaro, 2014). In contrast, women’s experiences of homelessness are often less visible than men’s because they are more likely to experience living in temporary shelters, ‘couch (or sofa in the UK) surfing’ or staying with friends and family (Murray, 2011). However, there are some women who also ‘sleep rough’ and live ‘on the streets’ but this homeless circumstance poses high risks to their safety.
For women who do ‘sleep rough’, they tend to engage in strategies that render them invisible. Sociologists in the UK, Casey et al. (2008), gathered data from a questionnaire survey of 144 single homeless women without children and 44 interviews with women in Leeds, London, Sheffield and Norwich, England who did use public spaces as their ‘home’ (Casey et al., 2008, p. 913). The sample included women who had stayed temporarily in hostels, bed and breakfast hotels, refuges, squats, with friends and family, with strangers and on the streets (Casey et al., 2008, p. 901). Aged between 16 and 59 years old, 30 per cent were from minority ethnic groups, of African Caribbean, Black African, British Asian, Irish, Roma Gypsy and ‘Other White’ origin. The women who experienced homelessness did occupy public spaces, such as public toilets, museums, art galleries, libraries, hospitals, airports, car parks and ‘the space surrounding public and private buildings’ (Casey et al., 2008, p. 903). The study found that women ‘actively and strategically use these spaces to their own ends, and for their own needs and purposes, extracting and deriving positive benefit from them’ (Casey et al., 2008, p. 905). They resisted the rules of public spaces by ‘engaging in identity work’ by not being labelled as ‘homeless’ (Casey et al., 2008, p. 899). These strategies included: presenting as ‘respectable’, avoiding ‘well-known places on the streets’ where groups of homeless people congregate and sleep, avoiding being detected by timekeeping their use of space, developing relationships with gatekeepers (such as security guards or toilet attendants) and ‘projecting an image of toughness’, to avoid ‘unwelcome advances of other homeless people’, as well as workers from homeless agencies intent on ‘rescuing them’ (Casey et al., 2008, pp. 909–911). The employment of these strategies assisted the women to negotiate the practical, emotional and ontological impacts of literal homelessness (Casey et al., 2008, p. 901). Women experience homelessness differently to men and this also depends on their social and geographical locations, including urban-rural contexts.
The main cause of women’s homelessness is domestic and family violence, which has gendered and racialised aspects. In Australia, Indigenous women experience up to 38 times the rate of hospitalisation compared to other females, for spouse/domestic partner-inflicted assaults (Al-Yaman et al., 2006). American Indigenous feminist author Andrea Smith (2005) argues that violence against women cannot be separated from the violence of the State, from patriarchy, colonialism and white supremacy. That is, that Indigenous sovereignty and sexual violence cannot be separated because the appropriation of Indigenous land occurred (and still occurs) through gendered violence. In my small Australian study, the Aboriginal women who experienced literal homelessness discussed both racial discrimination as well as unequal gendered relations. In regard to gendered violence, the Aboriginal woman below expressed the feeling of ‘not being safe’ as a woman when ‘sleeping rough’, being obligated to ‘have a partner’ or ‘a group’ for protection and choosing the ‘wrong’ violent man:
You more or less have to have a partner. Or you’ve got to stick with a group … to keep you warm and look after you … but it doesn’t always work … some partners, chosen the wrong ones, turn out to be the most violent of the lot … I’ve slept by myself … but you don’t sleep … you just lay there.
(Aboriginal woman, aged 43)
As evident in this quote, while women experience homelessness because of domestic and family violence, they are also likely to experience further violence while homeless (Murray, 2011).
As well, in Australia, young women have the highest rate of assistance by homeless services. Watson’s (2011, p. 639) study of 15 young women in Australia about ‘survival sex’ positioned its occurrence within a context of gendered discourses. She found that the young women held a sense of personal responsibility for managing their own situations. She concluded that young women experiencing homelessness are ‘subject to the pressures of individualisation that have been produced by the neoliberal policies of Western capitalist societies’, in which they ‘are required to find individual solutions to structural problems’ (Watson, 2011, p. 639). These social inequalities reinforce community attitudes and social norms that support violence against women, leaving many unjust gendered (and racialised) practices unquestioned (Pease and Flood, 2008, p. 547; Zufferey et al., 2016).
When exploring gender and sexuality, the literature on sexuality and homelessness is sparse. Sexuality has received less attention than other axes of social analysis in the fields of social work (Rowntree, 2014) and homelessness (Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014). One out of the nine stories of homelessness that I draw on in this chapter spoke of the effects of heterosexual dominance (Zufferey and Kerr, 2004). Heteronormativity is how ‘heterosexual privilege is woven into the fabric of social life, pervasively and insidiously, ordering everyday existence’ (Jackson, 2006, p. 108). One young non-Aboriginal woman claimed that homophobia in ‘the homeless situation, it’s even worse than normal society’ and expressed how she felt empowered when marching in the Pride March: ‘I marched in the Pride March … I realised the meaning of pride … it’s not just about being gay … it’s saying … pride … and gay or straight … don’t pick on me … I’m not going to take it!’ (non-Aboriginal woman, aged 23). This young woman is clearly voicing resistance to dominant heterosexual norms from a social justice and human rights advocacy perspective: ‘don’t pick on me … I’m not going to take it!’
Previous research has found that homophobia in the family home (and the wider society) increases young people’s risk of experiencing homelessness (Dunne et al., 2002). Social discrimination related to sexual identity can contribute to the loss of ‘home’ and the onset of homelessness (Gold, 2005). The heterosexual, nuclear family home is held up as the ‘emblematic model of comfort, care and belonging’ (Ahmed et al., 2003; Fortier, 2003, p. 115). However, young people often flee unsupportive family homes in the process of ‘coming out’ to more freely express their sexual identities in adulthood (Pilkey, 2013a; 2013b). In contrast to the idea of the nuclear family home as being essentially homophobic, Australian social geographer Andrew Gorman Murray (2008, p. 31) considers the experience of GLB youth who are well-supported by parents and siblings. He argues that family homes can become sites of resistance to wider practices of heterosexism, and that heterosexual identity does not ‘essentially’ generate heterosexist reactions and attitudes, but can make space for non-heterosexual subjectivities (Gorman Murray, 2008, p. 31). When considering an intersectional social work approach to homelessness, the complicated relationships between sexuality, age, homophobia and experiences of home cannot be ignored.
As well, Gorman Murray (2007, p. 229) explored the meanings of home for middle-class gay men and lesbians living in urban Australia using data from 37 in-depth interviews. He noted that normative meanings of home relate to privacy, identity and being with family but that they also vary across social groups, according to gender, race, class, age, disability and sexuality. He argues that meanings of home are being reinterpreted by gays and lesbians, and that their experiences in contemporary society can generate ‘homes that affirm sexual difference’ (Gorman Murray, 2007, p. 229). In our smaller study on the lived and imagined experiences of home and sexuality, the perspectives of men and women differed (Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014). Using data from a focus group of six women and individual interviews with three women, all who identified as lesbian, the women tended to construct home and community as belonging to a collective based on sexual orientation (Zufferey and Rowntree, 2014). In contrast, the two men interviewed who identified as gay or bisexual did not identify strongly with a sexuality-based collective as ‘home’.
When intersecting age and sexuality, the sexual expression of older people is an emerging area of study, although not specifically in homelessness. This literature tends to focus on the responses of staff in aged care settings to older people’s sexual expression (Petriwskyj et al., 2015), which is inextricably linked to residents feeling a sense of belonging and connection to being at ‘home’ within these facilities. In our Australian study that explored the expression of sexual intimacy in aged care settings, the perspectives of staff differed from community members (Rowntree and Zufferey, 2015). We found that staff members were more drawn to ideas underpinning a ‘needs’ discourse, informing residential aged care policies, procedures and practices that authorise and give power to staff, to meet residents’ sexual ‘needs’. On the other hand, community members favoured ideas that are consistent with a ‘rights’ discourse that aim to improve residents’ privacy and autonomy, by shifting the balance of power towards them (Rowntree and Zufferey, 2015). The total sample in our focus groups and individual interviews comprised 42 participants, of which 19 were staff members (18 women and 1 man) and 23 community members (15 women and 8 men), ranged in age from 24 to 86 years and of diverse cultural backgrounds (seven staff members were born overseas). One community member, who was also an aged care resident expressed indignation about the erosion of her rights, autonomy and privacy in her life since moving into aged care, which she did not consider assisted her to feel ‘at home’. For example, while being assisted with her shower, a nurse announced that the doctor was there to see her and asked if he could come in. She said:
Certainly not, either they can come back later or I’ll see them next week. I was highly incensed… . You’re always telling me this is my home. If I were at home, there would be no way that I would entertain a doctor while I was in the shower.
(86 year-old heterosexual widow, retired nurse)
Our research highlighted clear power differences between service providers, residents and community members and this related to how they viewed older people’s sexual expression (see also Rowntree and Zufferey, 2015). In the context of ageist social structures and institutions, older people are potentially subjected to oppressive social practices related to intersecting markers of age, gender and sexuality, that affect their sense of belonging and how ‘at home’ they feel in aged care facilities (and in society more broadly).
Furthermore, research indicates that older women who live alone are at greater risk of homelessness because they ‘will be poorer than men their age, less able to maintain homeownership, and less able to compete in the private rental market for affordable accommodation’ (McFerran, 2010, p. 79). Disadvantaging gendered social locations are evident in ‘the entrenched social and economic disadvantage that continues to separate the experiences of women and men’, and which intersects class, gender and age (McFerran, 2010, p. 79). Age can intersect with other areas of potential disadvantage such as ability, sexuality, gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic inequalities that contribute to increasing the risks of homelessness. Another aspect of age relates to children and homelessness.
In regard to children, there is a considerable amount of literature that focuses on the negative effects of homelessness on their physical and mental health, education, community and social connections, behaviour, emotions (such as grief and loss) and potential future aspirations (Buckner, 2008; Kirkman et al., 2009; Gibson and Morphett, 2011). Family and children’s homelessness occurs in the contexts of domestic and family violence, mental illness, substance abuse, poverty, child abuse and lack of housing affordability and suitability. Parents coping with homelessness and multiple stressors do acknowledge that their capacity to address their children’s needs is temporarily impaired (Gibson and Morphett, 2011, p. 23).Varney and van Vliet (2008) argued that supportive housing programmes and interventions need to be tailored to children and address multiple needs. The use of child centred approaches to respond to children who are homeless would involve: engaging them through play, reassuring them that they are not alone or to blame, showing genuine respect, working according to children’s developmental capabilities and asking them their understandings of events (Thomas, 2007; Gibson and Morphett, 2011). However, children’s experiences are likely to differ according to their abilities, social locations, gender and cultural backgrounds. Drawing on intersectional feminism, Damant et al. (2008, p. 123) argue that intersectional feminism is a promising approach to ‘explore the multiple and complex links among domestic violence, child abuse, and mothering’ and relevant ‘social identities and systems of oppression’.
The diverse voices of children who are homeless are important to hear (Mustafa, 2004; Moore et al., 2008). Children who are homeless can experience loss, shame, ostracism and labelling (Anooshian, 2003). Similarly to other countries, in the UK, black and minority ethnic children are also over-represented among homeless households (Mustafa, 2004). A report called ‘Listen Up’ by Zoya Mustafa (2004, p. 6) for Shelter UK gathered the voices of 29 (17 boys and 12 girls) children aged between 4 and 16, from a wide range of nationalities and ethnicities, documenting their views, thoughts and feelings about experiencing homelessness. The method used to collect data from the children were writing and drawing in activity books, completing a questionnaire and participating in drama exercises (Mustafa, 2004, p. 6), depending on age. The themes discussed by children about their everyday experiences of homelessness included: housing conditions, health and well-being, schools and education, leisure and play, unsafe local environments, broken relationships and the emotional effects of homelessness (Mustafa, 2004). Experiences of homelessness are considerably disruptive to children:
for four months we didn’t go to school, we went to six houses, no, seven houses and six new schools … I don’t like moving, because every time I make new friends and then I have to move again and again and again.
(Girl, 10, in Mustafa, 2004, p. 9)
In addition to being homeless in London, many of the children in the study from 11 different ethnic groups, had to deal with cultural and language barriers. Adverse experiences early in life for children of diverse backgrounds can have negative impacts (Perry, 2002) that then intersect with other social discriminations, based on nationality, race, ethnicity, class, gender and sex (to name a few). In the above UK study, culturally diverse children commonly felt socially isolated because of limited school attendance, and living in cramped and unsuitable accommodation. They also expressed feeling anxious about ‘what was acceptable within British culture’ (Mustafa, 2004, p. 27). An intersectional approach would enable social workers to be aware of shifting exclusionary discourses, to critically examine systemic inequalities and institutionalised classism, sexism and racism, including the intersection of xenoracist discourses with other social inequalities (Masocha and Simpson, 2011).
One female child described the effects of feeling ‘othered’ because she was living in hotel accommodation ‘occupied almost exclusively by other non-British households’, and feeling stigmatised due to exclusion from what she considers to be ‘English people’ (Mustafa, 2004, p. 27). She expressed feeling different from the wider ‘English’ community due to her housing situation:
There are lots of Arabs in the hotel … lots of Arabs with children and lots of Chinese. I didn’t see much English people but it’s full of Chinese and Arab people … I’d like to see some English people because it’s their place anyway, that’s the only English person I’ve seen so far is the security, the three security men.
(Girl, 10, in Mustafa, 2004, p. 27)
Thinking about these intersectional disadvantages facing children who are homeless enables social workers to respond better to these diverse experiences and unequal social relations that constitute homelessness.
There is considerable evidence that young people aging out of foster care are at high risk of homelessness (Dworsky and Courtney, 2009). In the USA, in 2009–2010, 59 per cent of children in the foster care system were ‘children of color’ and 22 per cent became homeless after aging out of the foster care system, compared to 2.6 per cent of the general population of 18–24 year olds, in that given year (AFCARS, 2009). In 2014, this trend continued, with African American and Hispanic children accounting for 24 per cent and 22 per cent, respectively, of children in foster care (AFCARS, 2014). Similarly, in Australia, structural and racial inequalities, such as the legacy of colonisation, Stolen Generation/s, high levels of poverty, ill health and inadequate housing, contribute to the over-representation of Aboriginal children in the child protection system. These children are up to seven times more likely to experience child maltreatment (primarily neglect, physical abuse and emotional abuse) compared to non-Indigenous children (Hunter, 2008). These statistics illustrate the importance of social workers responding to children’s homelessness from an intersectional approach, which would include intersecting socio-economic dis/advantages, gendered and racialised inequalities. Furthermore, an understanding of ‘adultism’ and adult privilege would assist social workers to finds ways of co-designing research and creatively engaging with children, so their voices can be made more visible in homelessness research and practice (Pease, 2010).
Intersections in youth homelessness
Youth homelessness is also a highly researched topic. Hickler and Auerswald (2009) explored the ‘worlds’ of white and black youth (aged 15–24) who were perceived to be homeless in San Francisco, through gender and ethnicity. They highlighted differences and similarities in pathways to homelessness, self-perceptions, survival strategies and the health of African American and white homeless youth. They initially engaged in participant observation and conducted ethnographic interviews with 54 young people (29 females and 25 males; 25 white, 2 Latino, and 27 African American), of whom 49 were street-recruited and 5 programme-recruited (Hickler and Auerswald, 2009, p. 825). The findings were then validated using concurrent epidemiological data collected from a sample of 205 youth, included 132 male, 66 female and 7 transgender participants, of whom 171 were street-recruited and 34 programme-recruited (Hickler and Auerswald, 2009 p. 826). They found that both ethnic groups shared common childhood histories but that white youth generally identified with the term ‘homeless’ and engaged in survival activities associated with accessed youth homeless services. In contrast, the sample of African American youth generally did not see themselves as ‘homeless’, possibly because of the stigma attached to the term, and therefore, ‘they were less likely to utilize, or be accessed by, relevant services’ (Hickler and Auerswald, 2009, p. 824). This reluctance by the young African American people to identify as ‘homeless’ and access services could be related to not knowing what services exist or patronising responses they may have received from services. Unlike Australian author Watson (2011) who researched the survival sex (trading sex for food, a place to sleep, other basic needs or drugs) of young women only, this study found that overall, 16 per cent of the young people (both male and female) reported that they engaged in ‘survival sex’, which did not differ by race or gender (Hickler and Auerswald, 2009, p. 828). This has further disempowering ramifications for young people, their experiences of homelessness and subjectivities.
Young people who are defined as ‘homeless’ but do not identify as being homeless are potentially influenced by simplistic and negative media coverage of homelessness that depicts negative representations (Hodgetts et al., 2006, p. 498). In London, Hodgetts et al.’s (2006, p. 497) study found that whilst homeless people emphasised aspects of their lives not present in media portrayals, they also represented themselves ‘through common media storylines’, invoking a normalising discourse. Hodgetts et al. (2006, p. 499) concluded that ‘groups who are marginalised cannot simply locate themselves within their own discourses’, for they too are social actors within a particular sociocultural context, and within intersecting power relations. Therefore, discursive representations of homelessness potentially have material effects, which contribute to young people being less likely to access services.
To examine the intersections of youth, race, masculinity and place, Canadian geographer May (2014) conducted 40 interviews and eight ‘where-I-live-tours’ of the city, with ‘Canadian-born young men of colour’ (aged 17–26), who have experienced homelessness in the Greater Toronto Area (May, 2014; 2015). He found that race contributes to continuing oppressions based on the intersections of racialised masculinities and homelessness. He notes that suburban areas ‘vibrate’ a racial ‘vibe’, compared with the whiteness of downtown Toronto spaces (May, 2015). He concluded that ‘racialised and affective landscapes shape, and are shaped by, the masculine performances of the homeless young men of colour in different city spaces’ (May, 2014; O’Neill Gutierrez and Hopkins, 2014, p. 3). Following this space-and-place literature in the field of geography that draws on intersectionality, I suggest that social workers can use a similar approach to better understand and theorise youth homelessness.
Homelessness can be a material reality, as evident in experiences of sleeping rough discussed earlier in this chapter (Zufferey and Kerr, 2004). However, it is also an emotion, a feeling or sense of loss when migrating to a new country or being forced to leave one’s ‘home country’. As discussed in Chapter 3, to explore narratives of home and homelessness in Adelaide, South Australia, with my colleague Dr Tammy Hand, we conducted 13 semi-structured in-depth interviews about ‘home’ with three men and ten women, from different cultural, class and age backgrounds (see Zufferey, 2015, p. 15). We found three distinct narratives of home: refugee and forced displacement narratives, family migration and mobility narratives and middle-class narratives of home.
For some people who have migrated, their new country is still becoming home, due to feelings of cultural displacement (Ahmed et al., 2003). In our Australian study, refugees and migrants who have had to flee an unsafe country (and ‘home’) to a new country and culture experienced feeling disconnected and grieved for their families. For example, a 21-year-old young man on a humanitarian visa said:
I’m living here, my home is here [in Australia] … In Afghanistan, I didn’t, did a good life, because I lost my father, I lost my mother, I lost my life, I couldn’t go to school … I think my home is now here, I’m safe … I’m so happy, they accept me to come to Australia.
Despite connecting with Australia as ‘home’, this young man felt very ‘alone’ and ‘sad’ without his family members, and at times felt ‘hopeless’. Yet, he did not identify as feeling or being ‘homeless’ because he was living in a house. In contrast, a 21-year-old woman who was a refugee on a Woman at Risk visa stated feeling ‘homeless’ in Australia because she was not feeling ‘mentally or physically comfortable … right now in my situation, mentally we can say I’m homeless’. These narratives showed emotional connections to ‘home’ as family and country. However, this young woman’s sense of not belonging intersected with her physical and emotional wellbeing, which can contribute to feeling ‘homeless’, even when living in a house, in a new, safer country. These two refugee narratives indicated that subjective understandings of homelessness differ and may intersect with other experiences such as loss of family, gendered violence and mental and physical health.
Seven of the 13 narratives in this study of home were from people who had recently (voluntarily) migrated to Australia or had memories of family migration. Migration narratives also reflected diverse subjective experiences of home, which included ‘being at home’ (asking questions such as: Am I or am I not ‘at home’ in Australia?), ‘leaving home’ (Should I have left my country?) and ‘going home’ (Where is home now?) (Ahmed et al., 2003). For example, a 27-year-old married woman of South American background expressed difficulties in transitioning to, and ‘feeling at home’, in Australia. Instead, she stated ‘feeling homeless’ without her extended family. Similar to the two young people of refugees backgrounds, her meanings of home and feelings of belonging related to connections with supportive family and friends, who lived elsewhere.
Family migration narratives had a consistent theme about travel and mobility in the past, present and imagined future, mostly unconnected to a physical locality (Ahmed et al., 2003). For example, one 29-year-old woman of mixed cultural background, including Aboriginal Australian origin, constantly moved during her childhood with her parents who were missionaries. Affecting her current connection to home, she described herself as: ‘pretty transient … I find it really hard to settle. I find it really hard to stay somewhere for any amount of time’. Yet, she does not identify as ‘homeless’, explaining that: ‘there’s many people travelling the world who live in backpackers and they are not homeless people’. As well, she said, even when ‘sleeping rough’, Aboriginal people are living ‘at home’ on their land and ‘country’: ‘they are on their land and they’re home’. This view resonates with my earlier studies about Aboriginal Australian connections to land as home and spiritual notions of homelessness, such as when people were removed from their land, communities and families (Zufferey and Kerr, 2004).
Middle-class narratives of home were evident in the stories of three women (two aged in their thirties and one in her fifties) and one man (aged in his thirties), who had no recent experience of family migration and were mostly of Caucasian origin. They were all homeowners and had never felt ‘homeless’. These narratives tended to focus on ‘home’ as owning and renovating a ‘house’ (or a number of houses), which symbolised financial security and the ‘production of middle class identities’ (Dowling and Power, 2012, p. 605). These narratives reflect meanings of home as a house, including a sense of financial security, stability, privacy, safety and the ability to control a living space, such as through house renovations and extensions (Gurney, 1999). For example, one 36-year-old married man bought his first house at 23 years of age and paid it off by the time he was 30. He said: ‘I’ve never lived in a rented house’. Now that he and his wife have a child, they are concerned about the ‘school zone’ and socio-economic location of their house, and are considering moving. His ‘ideal’ home is: ‘if money grew on trees, I’d have another beach side home in an even more glamorous beach suburb’. This homeownership aspiration ‘next to the beach’ is common in Australia. Three of these four participants (all in their 30s) owned investment properties. One 32-year-old married woman, with aspirations to have children in the future, said that they strived to be ‘budding capitalists with good investments … already starting to plan for being self-funded retirees … have a couple of businesses’ and a number of houses. However, what is left invisible in the promotion of multiple homeownership is how owning multiple homes in Australia as an investment and tax incentive has contributed to increasing housing costs, reducing access to affordable housing and increasing homelessness, which affects people who experience intersecting socioeconomic disadvantages disproportionately. The findings of this study are further discussed in Zufferey (2015). I conclude this chapter by promoting participatory and collaborative research designs as a way forward, when researching homelessness from an intersectional social work approach.
Returning to Housing First policy responses to address chronic homelessness as discussed in Chapter 4, Housing First has aimed to change the ‘balance of power between service providers and service users’ (Benjaminsen, 2014, p. 12) often found in institutional settings, such as large inner city homeless shelters. This shifting emphasis is evident in service user-led research reported in Intersectionalities: The Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity and Practice. One article by Canadian service users Coltman et al. (2015) reported on research that explored Housing First, community integration, mental health and homelessness. The study involved a secondary analysis of 14 purposively sampled transcripts from 18-month follow-up interviews in the At Home/Chez Soi Toronto evaluation. It explored how the participants discussed and ‘experienced community integration in their day-to-day lives’ (Coltman et al., 2015, p. 39). The researchers found that policies, practices and literature on ‘community integration’ are mainly concerned with external indicators, such as maintaining housing, accessing employment, education, engaging in community activities or improving living skills. Their findings are consistent with literature that indicates that the subjective experiences of communities are neglected, whether they are geographical or based on shared experiences and identities, such as volunteering, social interests and connection to pets (Coltman et al., 2015, p. 46). People also engage with communities on the basis of shared identities related to, for example, sexuality, cultural backgrounds or gender. The authors of this Canadian study advocate for ‘helping professionals to focus on ways in which empowerment can be supported’, and the importance of relationships in the process of community integration (Coltman et al., 2015, p. 49). They argued for more research on the effects that ‘larger systems and policies have on the lives of people who experience mental (ill) health and homelessness’ (Coltman et al., 2015, p. 49).
In relation to the impact of housing, they found that it ‘was more than just a place to live … [it provided] safety, security, and a place to get away’ (Coltman et al., 2015, p. 47). For example, their participant eight stated:
It’s not just a house for me or an apartment, it’s a home and I love it there. I love the security it gives me. You know, sense of security and sense of, now this is my own apartment as long as I pay the rent.
(in Coltman et al., 2015, p. 47)
Housing provided people with a feeling of ‘home’, security and self-worth. Housing symbolised that they were functioning members of society, connected to the geographical neighbourhood and to the people in surrounding living units.
Some participants, however, noted that they were happy with their housing but not their neighbourhood, which related to violence and drugs (Coltman et al., 2015). In some instances, hate crimes had a direct impact on people’s safety, including discriminatory homophobic attacks, as evident in derogatory language written on the doors of their housing, based on their presumed sexual orientation. Participant one shared: ‘Uh, yeah, yeah that’s why I’m, another reason I am moving so, yeah my, I’ve had uh, fag written over my door, on my windows’ (Coltman et al., 2015, p. 48). This quote makes visible the ‘hate crimes’ that people are subjected to in the context of oppressive homophobic community attitudes and heteronormative practices, which intersects with other areas of oppression in the lives of people who have experienced homelessness.
Overall, this consumer-led study found that experiences of past trauma, substance use, legal issues, disability, food and money insecurity were recurrent themes in service user perspectives on the Housing First approaches (Coltman et al., 2015). On the other hand, themes of self-determination, independence, empowerment, integration and inclusion also emerged in the narratives of people who experience homelessness and mental health problems (Coltman et al., 2015, p. 49). Led by researchers who form part of a Lived Experience Caucus, the study provides an example of service user-led methods and how unequal power relations in the research process can be re-configured. Likewise, I suggest the value of including service user-led methods, alongside ‘personal-is-political ethical reflexivity’ practices (Chapman et al., 2013, p. 24) in social workers’ intersectional approaches to homelessness.
Intersectional social work approaches involve embracing and examining the complexities of social work and homelessness, within a matrix of intersecting social differences, focusing on both privilege and disadvantage. I have assumed that social problems such as homelessness are socially constructed, and these constructions can influence how people come to view themselves (Hodgetts et al., 2006). However, exploring the perspectives of people who experience homelessness confirms that resistances are possible and intersectional oppressions are diverse and not static. Intersectional social work approaches can incorporate shifting and changing experiences of home and homelessness, depending on geographical and social contexts, providing for more diverse understandings of both oppression and privilege (Murphy et al., 2009). Such an approach does not provide definite answers to the research, policy and practice tensions in social work and homelessness. However, the approach does enable the asking of reflexive and inclusive questions about how power intersects in the lived experiences of the homeless, as well as in social work responses to homelessness. As social workers, what do we represent as being favourable or unfavourable intersecting ‘social location/s’, from whose perspective, why, when and in what context? From the perspectives of people affected by the dominant discourses that construct ‘disadvantaged’ identity categories, when are intersecting oppressions at the centre of that experience (Murphy et al., 2009, p. 55)? As well, when do social workers need to focus on intersecting privileges as central to their own practices and reflections (Hulko, 2015, p. 72)? These are perpetual reflexive questions for the social work profession.
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