‘They Paint Everyone With the Same Brush but It Just Simply Isn’t the Case’: Reconstructing and Redefining Homeless Identities

Abstract

Societal coverage of homelessness tends to focus on homeless people’s collective experiences of marginalisation. The charity organisation Crisis reminds us that ‘homeless people are some of the most vulnerable and socially excluded in our society’ (2012); The Big Issue repeatedly refers to the homeless as existing within a ‘shared social problem’ (2012) and CentrePoint (2012) reinforces a list of supposedly universal ‘effects of homelessness’ as being ‘disrupted education’, ‘poor physical and mental health’, ‘crime’ and ‘increasing debt’. While these features are, of course, in many cases true and undoubtedly important, the implication is that people experience the state of homelessness in identical ways — and particularly in ways which group them together to further ‘signify their social exclusion’ (Stephenson, 2006, p.64). Similarly, research into homelessness has focused on — or held the assumption of — a shared group experience among people without permanent homes (see Parsell, 2010, 2011). Studies have tended to orientate towards homeless people’s collective marginalisation (see Hodgetts et al., 2010), emphasising the typical traumas of life without a home (Williams and Stickley, 2011) or simply reinforcing the image of ‘homeless communities’ by clubbing behaviours together (see Coleman, 2000). In general, it seems that people homogeneously referred to as ‘the homeless’ are consistently presentated as a large, socially excluded collective who dwell in mutual experiences with identical characteristics.