Patrick Declerck thinks it does - or rather said so in the
interesting 'debate' at the Times Literary Festival. The 'homeless' or
as he calls them in the title of his book (The Shipwrecked) seem to be
marked out almost from birth as destined for the streets. And although
society spends a vast amount of money in the 'homeless industry' (it
pays my wages afterall - maybe there is an inbuilt bias against really
doing something effective. I remember when the St Giles project closed -
the funders said there were only eleven rough sleepers on the day
they counted. The cost of the project was 100K per year - and at that
rate they could pay each one 9K per year to go and live (not that they
would ever do that).
The function of the homeless is, according to Declerck, to act as an
object lesson to the majority community of the perils of not getting up
early to go to work. True or false - what did you think??
chris
Wendy's full transcript:
During last week’s debate between John Bird (of Big Issue fame) and Patrick Declerck (author of Naufrages (Shipwrecked)), John Bird said that he didn’t just work with homeless people, he worked with families in crisis, and people in prison, and with lots of other organisations, and he is astonished at the ‘walking wounded’ who have survived – who are still alive, in fact. ‘I don’t try and convert them with a sermon about the devils of drink. I’m a piss-head myself. I’m a coping alcoholic.’
‘But a percentage – however small - of the people are not over-damaged, and we could get them in and get them out. People at the bottom, I’m going to hold their hand. I want to stop them getting down so far so fast. I’m not a social worker, I’m not a shrink, I’m not an anthropologist. I know that blokes want jobs. They want the means of earning a living. My coping mechanism is working with other people.’
‘When people are given responsibility for other people, then they’re different.
But Patrick Declerck said he thought that society had an investment in blaming the homeless for being where they are. ‘They don’t get better, they don’t change, they are thrown out of the system, then they are abandoned again in disgust, sending them to mental hospital or jail.’
‘We have to deal with patients by recognising who they really are, respecting the logic of their situation. When people are given a chance, the places where they can be given that chance are few and far between. The vast majority of them improve dramatically given that chance – this can be measured in the amount of alcohol they drink A man drinking 5 litres of wine a day after a few weeks it can come down to 1 to 2 litres.’
‘You are better off being homeless now than you ever were’ John Bird (Big Issue founder) said at a debate at the Oxford Literary Festival in Oxford recently.
‘There are over 2,000 organisations providing for homeless people whereas in the 60s there was only St Mungo’s and Shelter.
The provision is enormous’, he said. ‘But the provision is still inadequate because it’s locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. If you’re in the care system, it’s costing £2,000 a month to keep you there. We have all the provision in the wrong places. You come out fit for the army or the doorway. Why don’t we shift provision into stopping people becoming homeless?’
We just create the oxygen for social failure.’
If we put people into housing in some kind of therapeutic communities they would have work, and they would have social engagement and they would have opportunities’
We need the Gatehouses which make people feel some self-esteem, and we also need some joined-up thinking about all the various separate sectors of provision.
We closed down mental hospitals, and threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Patrick Declerck said he had come to believe that the whole of the homeless support industry is unconsciously designed not to
solve the issue but to manage the levels of acceptability of a public scandal. Homeless people are not as excluded as they think. I think they serve an important function. By suffering under our eyes and dying of hypothermia they remain as a public warning of what happens if we give into laziness, if we disengage from our obligations. It’s social sadism. - more
