By Ryan Day
A recent study produced for government and community groups fighting homelessness is attempting to put a face on homelessness by pinpointing exactly who the homeless are and how they got there.
The study was born out of a PhD dissertation by University of Ottawa student Susan Farrell.
She says she was intrigued by how homelessness affects such a wide area of society, from issues of psychological and physical health to its impact on the community as a whole.
Farrell says she took on the project because she wanted to take a new look at the problem.
“I wanted to take a perspective that didn’t blame the homeless,” says Farrell, noting that most studies on the homeless have focused on the negative.
“I also wanted to look at some of the myths about the homeless, the idea that they’re all alcoholic men,” she says.
Farrell and University of Ottawa professor Tim Aubry then took the idea to the Alliance to End Homelessness in Ottawa-Carleton, a coalition of government and community agencies.
“It was a great opportunity to find out more than the superficial and stereotypical facts about homelessness,” says Trudy Sutton, co-chair of the Alliance.
Farrell and a team of professors and students at the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Research on Community Services interviewed 230 homeless people between January and May 1999.
Two hundred subjects came from shelters in the region and 30 were living on the streets.
“We attempted to be representative,” Farrell says. Subjects were taken from men’s, women’s, youth and family shelters in an attempt to get a cross section of the different groups experiencing homelessness.
Sutton says she was surprised by the number of reasons different groups had for being homeless.
“I was particularly surprised with the differences between men and women,” she says. “There’s just a huge number of females who have been abused.”
Eleven per cent of young men blamed parental abuse for their situation, compared with 25 per cent of young women. Eviction was given as a common reason by many, including nine per cent of single men and 11 per cent of single women, but the number jumped to 27 per cent for families.
Sutton says that being aware of differences such as these can be of great assistance to community groups.
“It gives us indicators as to where people can support themselves and where they need help,” she says.
It is hoped that by pinpointing the reasons for homelessness, community groups can better understand how to deal with the problem.
“We can use it to guide us as we develop services to help people on the street,” Sutton says.
It is unclear exactly how representative the study is, as there are no clear population statistics for the homeless to compare it to.
Compounding that is the finding that most people are homeless for a month or less, and very few are homeless for more than three months.
But in her 10 years working in Salvation Army shelters, Connie Woloschuk has seen the homelessness problem first-hand.
She says she agrees with, and wasn’t surprised by, the report’s findings.
“This is all stuff we’ve been discussing for years,” she says.
She says the report has few practical uses to her in dealing with the homeless, but adds it’s a valuable information tool.
She notes that while media attention to homelessness has been high in recent years, it has been on the decline lately.
“It’s been slipping away, but the problems haven’t.”
Woloschuk says that the report will be useful as a public relations and fundraising tool.
She says having some solid facts makes homelessness a little less abstract to the public and the media.
“I think it says it all.”