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Homeless people are not cockroaches or vermin – they are human and have rights
They are? Really? Who would have thought? 
http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2015/dec/21/homeless-people-not-vermin-cockroaches-human-rights
In many countries, homeless people who are engaged in the simple acts of eating and sleeping in the only spaces available to them – parks, public squares, or vacant lands – are subject to criminal sanction, given tickets (like illegally parked cars), and forcibly removed from city centres (also like illegally parked cars). Left to languish like garbage in a landfill on the periphery of society, they are rendered completely invisible. While this may be the preferred approach for some governments, it only cements stigmatisation and helps internalise discrimination against those who are homeless.
Around the world, homeless people are referred to in derogatory terms – vermin, cockroaches, pigeons – things to be exterminated. They are seen as dirty, lacking morals, and burdens on society. And people who are homeless are subject to horrific acts of violence based in hate: youth gangs are known to target and beat street homeless, and women who are homeless experience alarming rates of sexual violence, including rape. Instead of immediately responding to address the harm, as governments might be expected to do, the victims become statistics at best.
All of this – and it’s just the tip of the iceberg – makes it possible for us to walk by homeless people’s makeshift abodes without a glance, to ignore the fact that many people are struggling to survive without electricity, heat in the winter, running water, a toilet or even a clean place to sleep. This paves the way for those of us with privilege to literally step over homeless people in the street and see and feel nothing. No connection, no kinship, no responsibility, no compassion. Filled with discriminatory misperceptions of who is homeless and why, it’s easy for us to assume homeless people are responsible for their own demise.
But we need to resist the urge to blame the victim. You see, if there were just several hundred homeless people worldwide we might reasonably conclude that homelessness is about the bad choices or bad luck of a few. But the millions of people worldwide sleeping rough, doubled up with family and friends in overcrowded housing, living with violent partners or in squalor with no legal rights to their homes, suggests that there is more at play than individual pathologies. It suggests that governments are taking decisions, and creating societies that produce homelessness, that their policies and programmes are failing vulnerable and marginalised groups.
Around the world, homeless people are referred to in derogatory terms – vermin, cockroaches, pigeons – things to be exterminated. They are seen as dirty, lacking morals, and burdens on society. And people who are homeless are subject to horrific acts of violence based in hate: youth gangs are known to target and beat street homeless, and women who are homeless experience alarming rates of sexual violence, including rape. Instead of immediately responding to address the harm, as governments might be expected to do, the victims become statistics at best.
All of this – and it’s just the tip of the iceberg – makes it possible for us to walk by homeless people’s makeshift abodes without a glance, to ignore the fact that many people are struggling to survive without electricity, heat in the winter, running water, a toilet or even a clean place to sleep. This paves the way for those of us with privilege to literally step over homeless people in the street and see and feel nothing. No connection, no kinship, no responsibility, no compassion. Filled with discriminatory misperceptions of who is homeless and why, it’s easy for us to assume homeless people are responsible for their own demise.
But we need to resist the urge to blame the victim. You see, if there were just several hundred homeless people worldwide we might reasonably conclude that homelessness is about the bad choices or bad luck of a few. But the millions of people worldwide sleeping rough, doubled up with family and friends in overcrowded housing, living with violent partners or in squalor with no legal rights to their homes, suggests that there is more at play than individual pathologies. It suggests that governments are taking decisions, and creating societies that produce homelessness, that their policies and programmes are failing vulnerable and marginalised groups.
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