People experiencing homelessness (PEH) are highly vulnerable to discrimination and violence, which impact physical and mental health. The study examines past-month discrimination and violence against ...PEH in Los Angeles County (LAC).
332 PEH in LAC were surveyed about their past-month experiences with discrimination, physical violence, and sexual violence from April-July 2023. Analyses were conducted in 2023.
31.8% of respondents reported experiencing discrimination daily and 53.9% reported it weekly, whereas rates of lifetime discrimination in studies of general populations of minoritized groups range between 13-60%. Nearly half of respondents who reported experiencing discrimination (49.6%) believed that their housing situation was the reason they were targeted. Victimization was also common, with 16.0% of participants experiencing physical violence and 7.5% experiencing sexual violence in the past 30 days. These rates of past-month victimization are high when compared to past-year physical violence (3.0%) and sexual violence (0.24%) among general populations in major U.S. cities. In multivariate regression analyses, discrimination was associated with being unsheltered in a vehicle (p<0.05) or outdoors (p<0.001), weekly illicit drug use (p<0.01), and psychological distress (p<0.001); violent victimization was associated with being sheltered (p<0.05) or unsheltered outdoors (p<0.001), physical health conditions (p<0.05), and psychological distress (p<0.01); and sexual victimization was associated with non-male gender (p<0.05) and being unsheltered outdoors (p<0.05). Discrimination and victimization outcomes were not associated with any race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or time homeless characteristics.
Study findings highlight the dangers of homelessness in the U.S., particularly for those who are unsheltered outdoors.
There is significant research evidence which demonstrates that LGBTQI+ young people experience higher rates of homelessness than their straight and cis peers. However, estimates of the scale of their ...over representation in homelessness vary significantly. This partially reflects difficulties in identifying and researching LGBTQI+ homeless youth due to their invisibility within homeless services. Drawing on in-depth interviews with homeless LGBTQI+ youth in Dublin and other Irish cities and with policy makers, homeless service providers and advocacy group representatives, this article reflects on the causes and implications of this invisibility. As its title suggests, the article identifies four interrelated causes of the invisibility – the unreal, unsheltered, unseen and unrecorded nature of LGBTQI+ youth homelessness. The article examines how these factors individually and collectively perpetuate the invisibility of LGBTQI+ homeless youth, impede their access to services for homeless people and reduce the likelihood that homeless services will be tailored to meet their needs and enable them to successfully exit homelessness.
Being homeless in one's homeland is a colonial legacy for many Indigenous people in settler societies. The construction of Commonwealth nation-states from colonial settler societies depended on the ...dispossession of Indigenouspeoples from their lands. The legacy of that dispossession and related attempts at assimilation that disrupted Indigenous practices, languages, and cultures-including patterns of housing and land use-can be seen today in the disproportionate number of Indigenous people affected by homelessness in both rural and urban settings.Essays in this collection explore the meaning and scope of Indigenous homelessness in the Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They argue that effective policy and support programs aimed at relieving Indigenous homelessness must be rooted in Indigenous conceptions of home, land, and kinship, and cannot ignore the context of systemic inequality, institutionalization, landlessness, among other things, that stem from a history of colonialism."Indigenous Homelessness: Perspectives from Canada, New Zealand and Australia" provides a comprehensive exploration of the Indigenous experience of homelessness. It testifies to ongoing cultural resilience and lays the groundwork for practices and policies designed to better address the conditions that lead to homelessness among Indigenous peoples.
Certain populations are more vulnerable to the cycle of homelessness. We conducted a systematic review to identify studies on autistic individuals within the homeless community, who are a ..."hard-to-reach" sub-population. Eight Internet-based databases were used, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses guidelines. After completing the screening process for 870 articles, 17 were included in the review. We used a critical appraisal skills program to evaluate the risk of bias for these studies. Five articles estimated prevalence rates, thus suggesting an elevated rate of autistic traits in the homeless community of up to 50%. The remaining 12 (two literature reviews and 10 qualitative or mixed-method) reported that the homelessness risk factors amongst autistic individuals are co-occurring conditions, rigidity, and a lack of familial relationships and opportunities. The conclusions of the study are limited by the lack of qualitative data. Future research should focus on rigorous comparative studies of homeless populations with and without autism.
Homelessness became a conspicuous facet of Russian cityscapes only in the 1990s, when the Soviet criminalization of vagrancy and similar offenses was abolished. In spite of the host of social and ...economic problems confronting Russia in the demise of Soviet power, the social dislocation endured by increasing numbers of people went largely unrecognized by the state.
Being homeless carries a special burden in Russia, where a permanent address is the precondition for all civil rights and social benefits and where homelessness is often regarded as a result of laziness and drinking, rather than external factors. InNeeded by Nobody, the anthropologist Tova Höjdestrand offers a nuanced portrait of homelessness in St. Petersburg. Based on ethnographic work at railway stations, soup kitchens, and other places where the homeless gather, Höjdestrand describes the material and mental world of this marginalized population.
They are, she observes, "not needed" in two senses. The state considers them, in effect, as noncitizens. At the same time they stand outside the traditionally intimate social networks that are the real safety net of life in postsocialist Russia. As a result, they are deprived of the prerequisites for dealing with others in ways that they themselves value as "decent" and "human." Höjdestrand investigates processes of social exclusion as well as the remaining "world of waste": things, tasks, and places that are wanted by nobody else and on which "human leftovers" are forced to survive.
In this bleak context, Höjdestrand takes up the intimate worlds of the homeless-their social relationships, dirt and cleanliness, and physical appearance. Her interviews with homeless people show that the indigent have a very good idea of what others think of them and that they are liable to reproduce the stigma that is attached to them even as they attempt to negotiate it. This unique and often moving portrait of life on the margins of society in the new Russia ultimately reveals how human dignity may be retained in the absence of its very preconditions.
People experiencing homelessness often present to social service providers with trauma histories. As they seek services, their service providers may be secondarily exposed to their clients' trauma, ...thereby impacting the level of care these service providers are able to offer. Unfortunately, little research examines the stress burden carried by homelessness service providers, nor the factors that contribute to their stress burden. The purpose of this mixed methods study, therefore, is to characterize the secondary traumatic stress (STS) reported by individuals who provide direct services to people experiencing homelessness, and to explore the workplace experiences that may underlie, influence, or mitigate this stress. The study relies upon a sample of direct service providers and program managers who work with people experiencing homelessness. The authors collected data on STS and workplace stress via a web-based survey (n = 122) and focus group interviews (n = 21). The results of this study suggest that homelessness service providers carry a substantial stress burden. Findings further point towards administrative strategies that may improve service providers' stress burdens, and potentially improve the service quality provided by agencies serving homeless populations.
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