Our beleaguered Home Secretary Suella Braverman has said this week that being homeless is a lifestyle.
People are outraged. Being homeless is not a choice! Being homeless is a terrible misfortune that can happen to anyone! Cruella is telling us just how evil she is.
Most people commenting have absolutely no idea about what they are talking about.
Having worked with homeless people for 20 years, I would say Suella was bang on right. I shall explain.
Being homeless is not a choice:
It is for some people. Some men have told me they have chosen to live on the streets. They had been offered hostel placements or even a flat, and they just did not want them. Several years ago, I was concerned about an asylum seeker in my town living on the streets. He told me the name of his support worker. I phoned her and we chatted for some time. She had a lot of love for Mohammed. She had a place kept open for him in asylum seeker accommodation, but Mohammed kept choosing to live on the streets. I got Mohammed a tent and I left a bag of food outside of his tent when I passed Aldi at least once a week. Some people do choose to live on the streets.
Being homeless is a terrible misfortune that can happen to anyone:
Totally false. If you work full time, live within your means, don’t have a number of children who you cannot afford to support, don’t drink alcohol to excess and don’t take illegal substances, you are unlikely to be homeless. Even if you have a mental health condition, even if you are back from the front lines and have PTSD, you are unlikely to be homeless unless you are self medicating with drink or drugs.
Any homeless people’s worker will tell you that people make themselves homeless. Workers do everything they can, bend whatever rules they need to, to keep someone under a roof. Homelessness workers actually care, unlike the people virtue signalling on social media who have never spoken to a homeless person. People make themselves homeless.
How do people make themselves homeless?
People make themselves homeless through a continuous pattern of poor behaviours and poor choices. People don’t pay their rent. People instead buy big TVs, tablets, phones for all the kids and don’t pay the rent.
One recent youtube put out to psy ops us into believing people in the UK are poor featured a single father with four children. Big TV, two big 4 and 6 seater sofas, brand new washing machine and a nice kitchen. He was not poor. People on benefits as this single father was are not poor. They have far more money coming in than I have working more than full time hours. This father would have at least £100, possibly £200 per week coming in just for his Child Benefit payment. Having worked with people in “poor” communities, I can tell you people in the UK are not poor. They do, however, make poor decisions and keep making poor decisions.
Most people who are homeless have a drink or drugs problem. Very often both. They have benefits and they choose to spend their money on their addictions, and then beg for more money for their addictions.
There is help for addicts every single day in every town and city. Every single day. Every time an addict is arrested, they are offered treatment. Addicts, especially drug addicts, have weekly – sometimes daily – meetings with drugs workers, support workers, probation officers, social workers and community psychiatric nurses. They have all the help in the world thrown at them. The people who contribute the least to society, who cause the most problems in society are the people who take the most out of society.
But they have untreated trauma from childhood abuse.
Yes. And they choose every day to not get treatment, which is available every day of the week with the workers I have listed above.
There are also charities and the voluntary sector in every town and city, the biggest being MIND, who are there for everyone in the UK at any time or day, every day. MIND, if they cannot help you, they will send you to someone who can help you, but they will also stick by you and include you in group activities that each MIND centre runs such as gardening and hour long walks around the local area.
I come from an abusive family. I chose to go to university and get therapy and work and pay off my student loan and be free of it all. My sister chose to be a cocaine addict at 12 and a prostitute at 15. Same genetics, same abusive parents, two different sets of choices.
I have friends from Rwanda who were gang raped, left for dead, mutiliated and had all their relatives murdered. They made it to refugee camps, or walked across half of Africa and most of Europe to get to the UK. Not one is a drug addict or alcoholic. Every single one is a teacher or doctor or nurse or youth worker. They are all in professions that help other people – people who have been through nothing like they have been through. Yes, they have PTSD and have had very little help. They made choices though.
Now, how is it that some people go through stuff and they are successful business people, doctors, teachers, nurses, youth workers, church leaders, have children, have good marriages, never touch alcohol, drugs or even cigarettes and others fall into addiction and homelessness and abusive relationship after abusive relationship? Choices. Not just one choice but a series of choices.
Anyone can turn their life around by making one choice that is different, and then keep making better choices. Anyone can turn their life around. You can if you need to.
I kept my head down when it was all kicking off at home and it wasn’t me being hit or screamed at. I shut my bedroom door and did my homework or read or drew pictures of women with big breasts kissing women with big breasts. We all have our hobbies.
I kept my head down, kept quiet, got to university, and it was at university that people realised through comments that I made without my realising how bizarre they were, people realised that there was some seriously fucked up stuff in my life. And people helped. They could see I was not a bad person, but I was simply used to some off the wall street crime and the ideas I had about what makes a normal family were messed up. And people helped.
I was walking through a rough part of town, and there was a shop display where the mannequins were doing messed up stuff to each other. I laughed. The friend I was with said, no, this isn’t funny. I said it was, and it was normal and OK in a marriage. He said, “Think about it. Is it loving?” I stopped and thought and straight away, I completely changed my mind on BDSM.
I knew I was not OK. I wanted to change. Friends helped me and I responded because I was serious about changing.
Note well that I chose good friends. I chose people who had a much healthier approach to life than I had. I chose friends who were Christians who knew that they also had problematic areas of their own lives and they wanted to change those areas of their own lives. We all helped each other up.
Now look at homeless people. All their friends are either homeless or they are addicts or they are people whose lives are in other ways chaotic. Iron sharpens iron as the Bible tells us. You become who you hang out with. Who you choose to hang out with will determine a lot of your life – everything from your eating habits to your income. You will become who you hang around with. As Amadou et Mariam (the blind couple from Mali who have survived several wars now) sang “Choissiez Bien Vos Amis” – “Choose Your Friends Well”.
An addiction is formed completely after 14 days. That is 14 days of consistently choosing to pick up a drink or put a needle in your arm. Within those 14 days, you can choose to change your behaviour at any time and break the cycle of addiction in your life. Yes, addictions are often formed within those first 14 days, often within the first 3 days, but 14 days makes sure the full psychological as well as physical addiction is set in place.
And then the person is fucked. Their life will spiral down quickly.
A person is not going to have the rent money ready for the landlord if they are having to find £40-£100 per day for their heroin addiction.
But “no fault evictions” that are wrecking havoc in the lives of Brits today.
Why would a landlord want to evict the tenant when the landlord needs the tenant’s rent to pay their mortgage? Well, if a tenant doesn’t pay rent, under the old housing laws, the landlord would have to apply for court orders, and an eviction with bailiffs would take 8 weeks to action. If in that time the tenant pays even £10 rent, the whole application process goes back to week 0 and the landlord has to apply again to the courts for an eviction notice. It was a pain in the backside for landlords to get rid of tenants who did not pay rent.
Then there are tenants who trash the place. Or tenants who do things like the man down my street who egged other houses on the street, blasted his music and made daily threats to rape his neighbour. His behaviour towards his neighbour was so bad that the police erected cameras on our street pointing at his house. His landlord got wind of this and used a no fault eviction to get the nasty man out of our street and keep the woman living next door safe from rape.
There are reasons why landlords want nasty people out of their property. And then they move nice people into their property and everyone is happy.
Yes, sometimes the landlord needs to sell the property or move back in themselves, so they issue a no fault eviction to the tenant. That is not the tenant’s fault. However, I know through 20 years of working with homeless people and people with chaotic lives that the vast majority of the time, it is the homeless person’s fault that they are homeless.
When a person becomes homeless, they often are put into a homeless person’s hostel, like the several I used to work in. One night, another wonderful worker opened the file of all the names of people we had had in the hostel that year so far. He counted perhaps 20 people who had been successfully rehoused. Everyone else had been kicked out back onto the streets. My coworker asked, “What are we doing here?”
Why had those people been kicked out back onto the streets? Either they had been caught using heroin in the building – a big no no after two workers were jailed in the late 90s for knowingly allowing clients to take heroin in their hostel (The Cambridge Case as it is known), or the clients had been violent or sexually violent to other homeless people or staff. Everyone has the right to live in safety and free from violence and sexual violence, so of course we kicked out anyone who was violent or sexually violent. Of course we did and reported them to the police. Of course we did.
So be careful if you approach people on the street who are genuinely homeless. Some will be on the street because they have committed physical or sexual violence. Be very careful.
We did successfully rehouse people. Most of the people I successfully rehoused went into supported accommodation. I later worked in supported accommodations. These are places, often large houses, often purpose built, where clients have their own flat (apartment) and there is at least one member of staff on duty 24 hours per day. Monday – Friday from around 8am until evening, there are several members of staff on shift, and they are there to help the clients work through their issues, attend psychology appointments, drug addiction treatment appointments and clear their debts – most clients have debts because as I have explained, when people have what I call “other priorities”, they rack up debts. Having debts will mean no landlord will touch you, having been evicted from one place means no landlord will touch you. Workers in supported housing help clients to break this cycle and become appealing as a prospective tenant to future landlords.
Clients can stay in these houses for up to two years, unless they are kicked out for drugs offences or violence. Supported accommodations are where staff can really get stuck in and help clients turn their lives around. They are often wonderful places with wonderful results for the clients.
Back in the golden age of the late 90s, early 2000s, there were 16 houses which were dedicated to helping people with specific issues in the town where I worked. One house was a “wet” house, where alcoholics who did not want to stop drinking could live and drink, as long as they were well behaved when they drank. The workers there worked with the clients to contain the consequences of alcoholism.
Another house was for women who had been sexually abused in childhood. It was a beautiful house with a big garden and an all female staff. I got one woman in there and she flourished. There was another house for women who had been sexually abused in childhood. This house, the women lived there for the rest of their lives. One elderly client passed away, so a place came up and I got one of my clients into that house and she flourished there. She was seen by some of our workers out in the supermarket, doing the food shop with the other residents. She had grown her hair out, was talking and functioning and was much happier.
Recently, a man I sort of know reconnected with me. I had seen him back in an LGBT group chat and I saw that he kept writing “I” instead of “we” so I figured he was back because his relationship had broken down. So I messaged him and said hi. He phoned me, and that was cool. He told me he had a drink problem which had been under control, but he had started to drink again and his partner had had to care for him. This had put a lot of strain on the relationship and so the relationship had broken down. He was deeply ashamed.
This man is in his 50s. His partner is in his early 30s. Bit strange but OK. The 50 year old went on to say that he is a gay man and his partner was trans. He was not attracted to people born female. He was gay and he had no idea why he had got with a transman. I said yes, and people don’t realise just what a big deal being trans is. It is a huge emotional as well as physical upheaval. It is a big deal for the individual trans person, it is a lot for someone to go through, and that will affect relationships. It is a serious issue and journey, and I don’t think trans people get enough help for what they actually go through. That lack of appropriate support will impact any close relationship.
Here are the choices these two guys made:
1) Get together with someone after only just meeting at an event.
2) Ignore the 25 year age gap.
3) Ignore the fact that one is an addict and also has a stressful job.
4) Ignore the fact that one is transitioning.
5) Get with the first person who shows you any attention and cut yourself off from all of your friends and stop going to any social events. It’s just the two of you now.
6) Suffer silently without asking for help when the relationship turns out to not be what either partner really wanted and becomes stressful.
Look at each of those choices. Each choice is a big red flag. As I said, transitioning is a huge upheaval in a person’s life. It requires a lot of time, attention, support and understanding. An addict who is not sober and stable in sobriety cannot give a trans partner those things.
Changing one’s life takes a lot of time and a lot of better decisions. When a person turns their life around, they need to surround themselves with the sorts of people who make better decisions. A lot of us – I have been guilty of this – just hang around with whatever people are around because we are lonely and there’s not much to do, especially in small UK towns. We become who we hang around with.
I personally wish I had chosen to seek out better friends at one time in my life. I was in a small town on Teesside – a really shitty area of the UK; a nasty, impoverished, sad place – and I didn’t know anyone but I went to the local writing groups because I like writing, and the groups were full of people with personality problems and massive egos without any substance to back up those egos. Lots of people dressed in black who had never had a job, never done anything but they know everything. You know the people I’m talking about. I was in a bad place in my life and those people were just there. I wish I had sought out better friends.
I am currently without anyone to call a friend in the city I am in. After the lockdowns, the friendship circle I had from Nero’s coffee shop had broken down. I joined a lovely LGBT group and that was great for a year but it turned into a place with a very different crowd, and the decent, sweet people all left. I am now joining walking groups and craft groups, and I am meeting some decent people through my new job.
I am putting the effort in to look at what is on offer, look at people’s behaviours and the things they talk about as well as their attitudes, and then I can see if I want to join the activities and get to know any particular person. I am much more choosey about friends, and this is a good thing.
I am going to follow up this post with another about how homelessness is part of a subculture that we have allowed to grow in the UK. Again, the question of lifestyle is a pertinent one when it comes to homelessness in the UK.
We become who we choose to hang around with.
We choose the direction of our lives.
We choose our behaviour.
We choose to remain in a harmful pattern of harmful thoughts, attitudes and behaviours.
We can choose to change.
Good luck everyone.
catherinehume 