By Sharon Hartles 29th December 2018
With the traditional season of goodwill being upon us; one wonders if any thought is spared for those who will not make it through the night. Are the homeless out of sight, out of mind and forgotten?
Throughout the 'joyful' festive period - homeless citizens will continue to die. Their deaths, unless challenged will be recorded as a result of self-inflicted harms/choices. No mention of links to the crimes of the bankers (2007-2008), no mention of links to the introduction of austerity measures (2010) or to the austere social welfare cuts (2010 – present).
Whilst the homeless (proletarians) are disenfranchised, rapidly approaching sub-standard levels of existence; social murder exacerbates their quality of life and expiry date. However, as long as there is no framework or net in which to quantify this data; time is on the side of those (bourgeoisie) responsible for constructing and maintaining the preventable social murders of citizens categorised as homeless.
In addition to the lack of an official, universal homeless death counter; the infrequency of official reviews, means the deaths of homeless citizens are also going unexamined as well as unchallenged. "With no formal count of deaths and with so few reviews, officials cannot determine why so many homeless people are dying". Systemic deviance can be seen through the manifestation of reluctance by the government to implement, as standard practice, a universal, transparent homeless death counter and cooperative reviews to determine whether their deaths could have been prevented.
Social murder emblematises how and why the homeless are becoming ever more non-citizenised, and left in such a position that they perish as an inevitable consequence resulting from structural violence. A violence placed upon them, intertwined in every aspect of their lives, as an outcome of state policy discourse and filtered down into everyday practices which permits these conditions to remain. These natural processes normalise homeless deaths out of the publics' mainstream gaze, thus facilitating the limitation of opposition and resistance to such dominant and abhorrent regimes.
With little irony, it will come as no surprise to discern that social murder of the homeless is not recognised as criminal as categorised by conventional black letter law. A social harm approach exemplifies that only certain individuals', behaviours and actions and only certain events are deemed unworthy and therefore criminalised, while those of others are either not prohibited or legal. For this reason taken for granted understandings or common knowledge claims, of what constitutes crime and justice must be viewed critically alongside the concept of power. Who has the power to enact, evade and evoke the law? Who benefits and who suffers from the constructed laws?
The era of deregulation, or full-scale deregulatory assault, emerging from the late 1970s: Thatcherite, neo-liberal governance, competitive freeing of markets ideology, has paved the way for an augmented multitude of social harms. This continuous systemic assault has led to the rich getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer.
Inequality on such a scale has had detrimental (life ending) impacts on the most vulnerable and marginalised members of society including those who are labelled as homeless. Moreover, if this is not salient enough, the decentralisation of the government and dispersal of power to local authorities means it is even more difficult to point the finger of blame at those (powerful elite) at fault.
The criminalisation of homelessness, together with symbolic laws only further serve to perpetuate the victimisation and unjust nature of the underpinnings which govern society - one law for the rich and another for the poor. Given the scale of harm inflicted by the state-corporate symbiotic nexus, desperate need of 'real utopian' thinking must now be demanded in order to tackle the rising number of homeless social murders which has been compounded by austerity measures.
Lest we forget - that these measures were imposed as a consequence of the governments choice to bail out the banks, whose unregulated 'party games' manifested into the financial global crisis of 2007 - 2008! A consequence of these 'games' has been the successively intensified conditions which have given rise to the aforementioned social murder of members of society who find themselves homeless.
Seasonal greetings and a sheltered, prolonged life for the New Year to one and all who have not yet found themselves on the wrong side of social murder which has been exacerbated within the era of austerity. With the season of goodwill in mind a fitting surmise may be one of thankfulness. There but for the 'grace of God' go us.
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Please cite this article as:
Hartles, S (2018) Austerity, social murder and the homeless crisis [Online] Available at https://sharonhartles.weebly.com/austerity-social-murder-and-the-homeless-crisis.html (Accessed)
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All works are Open Access articles distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original works are properly cited.
© Sharon Hartles 2022.