Please Read ‘Lifestyle Choice Part 1’ prior to reading this.
As I said, with homelessness and so it’s a choice.
If you talk to the people with experience of homelessness, you will find out the many, multiple reasons of why they became homeless or are still homeless.
Most of them, not all, but most of them, go back to child trauma. Most of them are impacted by things that have happened in their life. Your mental health is something you drag with you from early days into your adult life and it may never be fixed, and sometimes is unfixable, and it can lead to homelessness.
Not through people’s own fault, but because of a lack of care and a failure of their needs to be met. You’ve got people who use drugs and alcohol to block out the bad thoughts, the traumas that they’ve gone through in their lives. And these issues are generally related to childhood ones. But you’ve also got the other groups of people.
A major part or the increase in male homelessness is the breakup of a relationship. When marriages break up the wife often keeps the family home and the children, and the men are forced out.
What to do if your housing is affected by a change in your relationship
In richer households and that kind of thing, your support workers are often your family but the difference being that if something bad happens and you lose your place to live you can go and live with your family in your little mansion, wherever it is or you can go and stay in that penthouse flat in Mayfair.
Some family systems don’t work so well when you’ve got a house that is already overcrowded. You can’t invite another person to move into that house to be even more overcrowded. And even if you do, those people are still homeless, technically still homeless, and it’s not their fault. It’s the circumstances that are to blame. That’s a major increase is family breakdowns, marriage breakdowns, that kind of thing, where generally it’s the male that has to move out.
You’ve also got the big one, the big increase because of lockdown, where women were made homeless because of being in a household that was dangerous for them to be in because the tensions were on the rise because they’re on top of each other all the time. They’ve had to move out and become homeless because of that.
It’s not a choice. They’re generally forced to move or whatever. There were traumas that they’ve had at youth and childhood that were never resolved. The issues were never taken on because we have a system that’s seen society turn its back on them. And that system, people talk about it more now, but has the system really changed to address that? I don’t think. So, to people like Braverman and all these other ones that think that people are homeless, that’s their choice, that’s their lifestyle, that’s what they’ve done to themselves – there are so many factors that require us to talk to these people, understand these people, and then you might actually start to find solutions to these problems.
But there are so many different things that have caused their homelessness. But as I said, the major thing generally comes from childhood, childhood traumas, being in disruptive households, being in a household that has never had anything. If you look at the records and if you bother to check and do your due diligence on checking on this, there are cases, big cases, where when the grandfather’s been homeless, the son has been homeless, and the grandson has ended up homeless as well. It tends to be that their lifestyle has become the only lifestyle they know because they’ve never been given the chance to come out of it. There are a lot of cases where you can watch the family generations follow the same lines.
Further reading on the links between adverse childhood experience and homelessness:-
Homelessness and Childhood Adversity By Charlotte Grey and Louise Woodfine, Public Health Wales
Adverse childhood experiences and homelessness: advances and aspirations
Further reading on the impact of generational homelessness:-
What are the statistics on multigenerational homelessness?
INTERRUPTING GENERATIONAL HOMELESSNESS AMONG YOUNG FAMILIES THROUGH A TWO GENERATION APPROACH:
