Support worker AG shares a brief overview of three of the people on her caseload who are currently rough sleeping:
‘When I tell people what I do for a job I often hear, ‘so you help people find a house? ‘Before I started this job I thought the bulk of my work would be about doing that, but I now know the issue to be more complicated. A lot of the people on my case load have an address but it doesn’t mean they have a home. Take S for instance, who, after sleeping next to a motorway for three nights was told by the doctor to ‘go home, just go home and have a normal life.’ He had stayed next to the motorway because it was one of the few places he knew where no one was likely to walk past him in his sleep. In the past he has been attacked while sleeping in a subway. He was scared to go home because of repercussions from an argument with his neighbour. He also told me that he was ashamed to go back to his flat because he had smashed it up in a drunken rage. He told me he didn’t know where to start so he carried on drinking because it’s what he knows. His mental health had deteriorated significantly due to a combination of drinking and lack of sleep and the strong smell of fumes that occurs when you’ve spent a long time next to a motorway. It’s easy to say just have a normal life but the thing is, he doesn’t feel very normal, he has never had a ‘normal’ life. He was abused sexually and psychologically during his childhood and teenage years by family members and friends of the family, he can’t remember feeling relaxed and ‘at home’, home was not a healthy place to be, it was lonely and frightening and the feelings that stem from those experiences fuel his destructive behaviour. Sleeping rough provides him with a temporary escape from it but, often, the escape is just as damaging.
D has fled violence and debt to a loan shark by giving up his council house and moving to the City where I work. He sleeps in the corner of a car park where the security guards turn a blind eye but he doesn’t know how long they will carry on doing that. He told me he hasn’t slept on a bed for weeks and due to his drug habit he finds it difficult to keep to appointments with services and organise his time. A few weeks back he was attacked at night on his way back to the carpark by a group of young men who called him a tramp and told him they would hospitalise him. He is not young and he is in poor health and uses crutches which the gang used to hit him with before stealing them. In the times I have talked with him since this incident I find he is becoming increasingly depressed and anxious which is leading to an increase in his drug use.
L has a place in a large hostel where she feels unsafe due to threats of violence from a neighbour and drug dealers knocking on her door. She has told me she feels safer sleeping rough sometimes so she spends some nights on the streets. She is classed as priority A by the council due to her fleeing domestic violence and having epilepsy and she has been bidding fortnightly for eight months now. Her other option is to find temporary accommodation in another hostel but this could mean she is moved on frequently, making all the other areas of her life difficult to manage due to the changing of address.
The reasons behind their choice to rough sleep are all varied on the surface, but underneath that is a common theme of fear. No-one chooses to sleep rough for fun. It is a hard and desperate life often leading to long term health issues and leaving individuals stuck in cycles of behaviour that further exacerbate their situation.’
Thank you to Nigel Tooby our ‘Artist-In-Residence’ for the image used in this post. Very often people who sleep rough find that their ‘safe stash’ gets defiled by members of the public in their absence, leaving them without dry, warm bedding for the night.