Answers to Questions about Homelessness

It's not fun, that's for sure. Imagine you've been assaulted a number of times before and you are out walking alone after dark down a street in a bad area of town. For me, being homeless felt an awful lot like that, most of the time. Being homeless makes a person very vulnerable to human predators and after a short time most homeless people find this out the hard way.

When a person becomes homeless they lose a lot of things at once. Safety and security are gone. Possessions are gone because all a person can keep is what can be carried around. Relationships and friends disappear. Faith in family can be lost. Children can be taken away. Jobs may be lost if losing a job wasn't the reason for becoming homeless in the first place. Dignity is stripped away.

There's no regular place homeless people can bathe so it's almost impossible to stay clean or as clean as you would like.

Most human beings are used to having somewhere to sleep, somewhere to retreat from the world, to have privacy. Homeless people don't have any of those things. Some homeless people are so sleep deprived they can barely function.

So, for many, homelessness is a life of fear, loss, filth, humiliation and profound exhaustion - not a walk in the park by any means.

You can read more about my homeless experience at What I Learned While Being Homeless.

This question has quite a few different answers. It depends on the person in question.

For me, my experiences with shelters were about as frightening as sleeping on the street. I was harassed by other shelter users and followed from a shelter by a sexual predator. A single woman leaving or waiting to enter a shelter is a target for all sorts of unpleasant things. While I didn't ever get robbed in a shelter, I was there when others had been. And while I was not assaulted in a homeless shelter, I had to fend off unwanted advances and offers of money for sexual acts both from other shelter users and from staff. Add to that the fact that I got both scabies and pubic lice from using shelters and you might get some idea why I only used them when I was extremely exhausted. At least you won't get parasites from sleeping on the ground.

For some people their reasons for not using shelters (in addition to those I listed as my reasons) may be the anti-drug policies the shelters enforce, the long wait to get in, or it may be that they can't get in. There just are not enough "beds" in shelters to accommodate the number of homeless people in most parts of America.

You can read more in-depth answers, some of which may shock you at Why Homeless People Avoid Shelters.

It seems like a homeless person could just get a job and stop being homeless, right? This question about homelessness is so popular and requires such a big answer that I wrote an entire page on the subject - Why Don't Homeless People Just Get Jobs?

There are a lot of ways an individual, family, or group can help homeless people. You can give time, money, or knowledge. You can work on spreading empathy for homeless people and you can work for social change to prevent homelessness. The most important thing is to choose something and to do it. To help you decide on something to do to help homeless people I wrote a page called The Best Ways to Help the Homeless. You should be able to find an idea there or on one of its links which you and your family can do.

I think this is at least a two-fold problem. Some addicts lose control of their lives and become homeless due to their addictions.

But some people become homeless and turn to drugs or alcohol as an escape from the misery of being homeless or from self-medication for illness. It may start out as a swig of alcohol to get to sleep on hard ground or to get to sleep despite the fear of being assaulted. Alcohol might be used to serve in place of the prescription painkillers they can't afford. But it tends to escalate. Sometimes the homeless person in question may even be trying to end their lives in a semi passive manner.

I've asked some people who ask this question "how many times would you have to be physically or sexually assaulted with no hope of escaping future attacks on your person before you turned to the bottle either to die or to escape?"

But the fact is that many homeless people are not addicts at all, just people down on their luck.

Generally, people become homeless when something beyond their ability to cope with occurs and their social support structure, family and friends, fails them. Without a supportive family to serve as a safety net, almost anyone can become homeless under the wrong circumstances.

Since there are so many reasons people become homeless and most can't be clearly explained in just a sentence or two, I wrote the lens Some Reasons People Become Homeless to answer it.

Sometimes, a child can be homeless and alone. Sometimes this happens by accident such as through a natural disaster but more often it is due to abandonment or due to the child running away from home. Who would be best for the homeless child to get help from depends a great deal upon the situation. If the homeless child or teen has been abandoned or has run from an abusive situation, the police are a good place to start because a crime has been committed against them.

A reader asked for suggestions in the event the child is frightened of police. For whatever reason, children and teens that find themselves homeless may be frightened of police, whether parents instilled the fear in them or they've been homeless long enough to develop a fear of police on their own. In that case, Child Protective Services is a good option. If the child is attending school, he or she can seek help from teachers or other school staff such as counselors. Children and teens that find themselves homeless might feel more comfortable seeking help at a church or from the parents of a friend.

Covenant House is one of my favorite homelessness charities as they specialize in helping homeless children and teens. They have a special, toll-free number that teens and children in the US can call - 1-800-999-9999. It's called the Nineline and the line is open for calls 24 hours a day. There's also a US line for teens who are thinking of running away from home 1-800-RUNAWAY which will help them through their situation and help them get the right help. In the UK there's a line called Runaway Helpline, their free to call number is 0808 800 70 70 and their URL is http://www.runawayhelpline.org.uk/ - they can be accessed by phone, text, or online.

I will be adding more to this segment as my research pays off.

A few people have asked me "if homelessness has affected you so deeply, why don't you donate your lens earnings to charities that fight homelessness?"

I would love to donate the proceeds of this lens and all of my others to help homeless people. Unfortunately, I'm on the very edge of homelessness myself.

You can read about why I'm in financial difficulty here.
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