Sub City: Young People, Homelessness and Crime

Julia Wardhaugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351897167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Youth homelessness increased rapidly during the late 1980s and early 1990s, at a time when street homelessness in particular became increasingly associated in the popular mind with dangerousness and criminality. This book analyzes the construction of homelessness as a social and legal 'problem' and documents young people's own experiences of homelessness, crime and danger. Drawing on the authors' own field work in a range of urban and rural locations, the book addresses themes of home and homelessness, of exclusion and marginality and of risk and urban incivilities.

1 Researching homelessness

The homeless are the inhabitants of sub city, living in subterranean ways beneath the gloss and the affluence of post-modern cities. Street homeless lives are conducted in basement day-centres and in back alley-ways, while hostel-dwellers lead anonymous existences in towns and cities throughout the country. This sub city motif is a familiar one but does not convey the whole of its meaning, for beyond the well-documented urban situation lies the lesser-known rural homelessness. This takes us to the second meaning of sub city, the sense in which the countryside has been constructed as subordinate to the city, and its social problems thus rendered invisible (Lawrence, 1997; Milbourne, 1997). Finally, our concern is with the cultural adaptations and social organisation of homeless ‘sub citizens’, those who are socially marginal, economically disadvantaged and politically disenfranchised.

Even among the homeless themselves, all excluded to a greater or lesser degree from home, community and citizenship, some are less able than others to find a sense of belonging and identity. As we shall see in chapters four and six in particular, structural factors such as race and gender mediate individual experiences of home and homelessness, aside from the vagaries of personal biography and disposition.

The phenomenon of homelessness has fascinated successive generations of qualitative researchers, many of whom have engaged in extensive debates concerning the ethics, politics and morality of their enterprise. This chapter briefly reviews this research tradition, and is otherwise largely concerned with reflecting on my own role as an ethnographic researcher in relation to homeless people.

The research projects

The research on rural homelessness took place in Shropshire in 1992 and in North Wales in 1998: fifty focused interviews were conducted in Shropshire, and ten in-depth interviews in North Wales, along with some local archival research. This empirical work contributes to the rural case-studies presented in chapters six and two respectively, and the stories of two people in the North Wales study appeared in the prologue. These case-studies are somewhat exploratory, given that rural homelessness is under-researched, but nevertheless they have something important to contribute to debates concerning the social ordering and regulation of space (Ching and Creed, 1997; Cloke et al, 1997).

The more extensive research was urban-based, and was conducted within the ESRC-funded Three Cities Project. One hundred homeless young people were interviewed in-depth in the cities of Manchester, Stoke-on-Trent and Birmingham (plus two in Wolverhampton): four of these life-stories have been related in the prologue, and aspects of many other lives appear in chapters four, five and six. A range of homeless situations was investigated, including hostel-dwellers, squatters, new age travellers and the street homeless. The majority of these young people were contacted via agencies working with the homeless - including hostels, day-centres and Big Issue offices - and a minority were contacted directly on the streets in order to include those who subsist outside of the homelessness circuit.

Interviews were also conducted with representatives from an extensive range of statutory and voluntary agencies: hostel managers and day-centre staff; staff in Big Issue offices and on soup-runs; police and probation officers; social and youth workers; housing and social security officials; drug and alcohol advisers; pressure group coordinators and many others. Over a period of two years, extensive observation (sometimes participant but more often not) was conducted of homelessness in these three cities. This is the method - perhaps the most problematic as well as the most productive - that is addressed in the three scenarios below.

The Three Cities Project took place at a time when street homelessness was high on the political agenda, with particular attention being directed to the associated incivilities of begging and sleeping rough (Hunter, 1985). The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 was passing through parliament and both Government and Opposition were fulminating against those modern folk devils, beggars and new age travellers. Few could fail to be aware that the face of ‘new’ homelessness was becoming ever more youthful and desperate.

Recent economic and social policy initiatives had included radical and detrimental changes to the welfare benefit system for young people (Carlen 1996); reduced entitlement to rehousing on the part of the homeless; and the instigation of the Rough Sleepers’ Initiative, first in London and then in other English and Scottish towns and cities (Randall and Brown, 1993). On the criminal justice front, high numbers of beggars were being prosecuted under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, while police responses alternated between a reluctance to arrest homeless people for what were essentially status offences, and the undertaking of periodic special operations designed to clear the city streets of beggars and rough sleepers. The evolution and provisions of the 1824 Vagrancy Act are examined further in chapter two, while chapter six takes up the question of police responses to street homeless people.

The project set out to investigate from an ethnographic perspective criminalisation, victimisation and lawbreaking among the homeless population (Carlen, 1996; Wardhaugh, 1996; Wardhaugh, 1999). Within these general empirical and methodological parameters, each member of the team had a different research role to develop, both in the field and in relation to one another. The research assistant was appointed in the second year of the project and, as a streetwise man who shared many aspects of youth culture with the subjects of his research, he soon developed his own distinct research role. As a junior researcher (having completed a Masters degree, but not yet registered for a doctorate) he was accountable to both the other members of the team, and received general academic supervision from Pat Carlen and more specific fieldwork training from myself.

The roles of the co-directors and joint grant-holders on the project were somewhat different. As professor and head of department, Pat Carlen was involved in a range of other academic activities and therefore engaged in general oversight rather than direct involvement in fieldwork. As a full-time senior researcher on the project my time was spent in intensive fieldwork, in day-to-day supervision of the research assistant, and in detailed planning and development of the project.

In terms of funding, we were invited to resubmit our initial proposal to the Economic and Social Research Council, and were successful with our second, somewhat smaller-scale version. We were confident that we could construct, as requested by the funding body, a successful project around two research workers rather than three as originally requested, but an issue of great concern to us was the question of making payments to interviewees. Our initial request for the (we thought) modest amount of £1,000 was rejected on the grounds of lack of precedent, although one of us (Carlen) had made such payments under a previous grant from the same funding body.

It was our strong political and ethical belief that socially and economically vulnerable participants in our study should be paid for their time, and so we contrived in a number of ways to make such payments possible, sometimes in cash and sometimes in kind (food and cigarettes). We understood the possible objection that we were therefore ‘buying’ people’s stories, but were able in practice to ensure willing participation on the part of potential interviewees before the question of payment was raised. In paying homeless people for their time we were reversing the more usual emphasis on the researcher entering the world of the researched, and instead brought them a little way into ‘our’ world, with its emphasis on the dignity of employment and economic reward for labour.

Personal biography

Many ethnographers talk about having ‘paid their dues’ by virtue of their participation in the physical privations and social indignities of homelessness, and thus of having earned the right to conduct their research and subsequently to tell their stories. Harper, for example, presented himself ‘with the outside trappings of a skid row man’ in order to gain rich qualitative data as an ‘inside observer’ (1979:26). He recognised the ethical dilemmas involved in such covert participant observation, but failed to anticipate the dangers of ‘going native’:

As I became more and more integrated into the lifestyle, I realised that it was more attractive to me to experience the life of my informants than it was to produce documents about it (Harper, 1979:27).

For myself, it was not these dangers that deterred me from adopting ‘going undercover’ as a research technique, but rather some personal and ethical considerations. My own experience of homelessness might have tempted me to feel that perhaps I had already ‘paid my dues’ and therefore had no need to prove myself in this way. Encounters with homelessness have taken several forms within my personal biography, including several months spent in a hostel as an infant and a period of ‘hidden homelessness’ in later childhood - an episode when our small nuclear family (mother, brother and myself) lived in one household with several members of our extended family, while awaiting rehousing.

However, to use such aspects of personal biography (either past experiences of homelessness or present attempts to enter the social world of homelessness) in order to claim some particular authenticity for one’s research seems to me to be of limited validity, in both personal and intellectual terms. Personal biography is of course important in bringing us to the point of conducting our fieldwork, and will inevitably influence the quality of our interactions within the field. In my case early experiences undoubtedly affected my motivation to engage in homelessness research, as well as informing the nature and quality of my fieldwork. Nevertheless, leaving aside the tramp authors who may or may not have been homeless, researchers of homelessness are in the privileged position of having a safe and comfortable home to which to return, either after the end of their day’s work or following a period spent undercover as a ‘homeless person’. I believe it is essential to acknowledge the material and social differences that exist between the researcher and the researched, and thus to recognise the limits that necessarily exist in terms of ‘our’ entering into ‘their’ world.

Homelessness research

Social scientific exploration of homelessness has a long history, dating back in Britain as far as the Elizabethan rogue pamphleteers who established what some commentators have interpreted as a proto-sociological perspective, and who certainly pioneered qualitative and ethnographic approaches to the study of vagrancy (Harman, 1566; Dekker, 1608; Aydelotte, 1913; Judges, 1930; Kinney, 1990). This tradition was later developed by the Victorian and Edwardian ‘social explorers’: the philanthropists, novelists and social scientists who regularly went undercover in their investigations of the social world of homelessness, and many of whose methods and perspectives were to influence subsequent generations of ethnographers (Dickens, 1853; Higgs, 1906; Chesterton, 1928; Beresford, 1979). Chapter three examines this literature of homelessness and crime in some depth.

From the early twentieth century onwards, the geographical centre of such enquiries shifted from Britain to North America, with the denizens of the Main Stem and Skid Row quickly becoming established as a major focus of interest for sociological and criminological ethnographers. In the years up to 1965 alone, more than 150 North American studies were published about Skid Row, that real yet symbolic location that came to epitomise marginality, deviance and social exclusion (Wallace, 1965; Russell, 1991).

Perhaps the most famous of these early American ethnographers was Nels Anderson (1923), whose Chicago School study of ‘hobohemia’ proved to be definitive in terms of both theory and methodology. Anderson departed from the conventions of inter-war sociological theory that defined marginal people as dysfunctional deviations from social and economic norms, instead developing a detailed and sympathetic account of the complexities and intricacies of hobo life. Such knowledge derived from his own time spent on the road: ‘for a number of years Anderson had not been a participant observer and bona fide sociologist: instead he had been an observing participant and bona fide hobo’ (Watson, 1997:x). Moral and ethical considerations notwithstanding, such extended periods spent ‘going native’ undoubtedly served to produce material that is rich in qualitative detail.

The drive to seek ethnographic authenticity by going undercover, while rarely adopted for such extended periods as was the case with Anderson, was nevertheless a significant part of the North American qualitative tradition of homelessness research from the 1920s until the 1970s, after which time it began to decline in popularity as a research technique (Allsop, 1967; McSheehy, 1979; Vander Kooi, 1973; Wiseman, 1973). Those contemporary ethnographers who have attempted to go undercover have encountered both psychological and ethical difficulties:

Psychologically I knew I was not homeless ... yet I ended my participation after two nights ... because I was becoming deeply depressed ... and I began to understand how one’s identity can be lost. I also knew that a homeless woman might need my bed (Russell 1991:28).

Perhaps times had changed in that researchers were by now more willing to admit to such difficulties, or perhaps as a woman Russell took a different view of the streets. Certainly, female ethnographers have been more likely to acknowledge the psychic and physical dangers of homelessness, and have been less drawn to the romantic imagery of the open road than their male counterparts (Crouse, 1986; Garrett and Bahr, 1976; Harper, 1982; Golden 1992).

The majority of studies up until the 1970s focused on one dimension of Skid Row life above all others: the consumption of alcohol. Although excessive consumption was to be found only among a minority of the homeless, this nevertheless came to serve as a signifier both of the social deviance and the psychological alienation of the denizens of Skid Row. Despite such a focus on marginality and alienation, the criminological dimension of most such studies remained implicit, with only a few adopting an explicit empirical focus on crime and deviance (see for example Bittner, 1967; Rose, 1965, 1997; Spradley, 1970).

Rose provides an ethnographic and ethnonomic account of Skid Row in Denver, Colorado, leading a team of researchers, one of whom ‘played the role of a bum’ during the course of the investigations (Rose, 1965:3). Unusually for its time, this study of Larimer Street focused on the agents of social control as well as on the men living in this ‘unattached society’. Rose added his distinctive methods of analysing natural language to the already diverse and well-developed tradition of homelessness research, emphasising the need to understand social worlds from the inside by means of first-hand accounts. For Rose language was not simply the means by which social interaction took place, it was the very essence of such interaction. Consequently his report contains extensive narrative accounts taken from the field, accounts such as the ‘poignant story of survival’ told to Rose by Johnny O’Leary.

Dedicated to ‘my friend the tramp’, Spradley’s (1970) classic ethnographic study of ‘urban nomads’ is one of the few within this empirical and methodological genre to focus specifically on criminal justice dimensions of Skid Row life. Spradley documents the complex social rituals that take place over time and in space to define individuals as ‘tramps’ or ‘bums’ and thus render them liable to arrest for what they are rather than for what they do. The ethnographic power of this text centres around its vivid descriptions of the stages involved in ‘making the bucket’, that is, being arrested and incarcerated in the ‘drunk tank’ as a tramp.

In Britain during this period, work on homelessness was mostly written in a social documentary or journalistic style, and was motivated primarily by an agenda of social concern and social change (Deakin and Willis, 1976; Erlam and Brown, 1976; Wallich-Clifford, 1974; Wilkinson, 1981; Sandford, 1971; 1976). With only isolated exceptions (see for example Archard, 1979), an academic ethnographic tradition of homelessness research did not become established in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century, and therefore the present project referred in methodological terms to a mainly North American corpus of work (Russell, 1991; Golden, 1992; Snow and Anderson, 1993; Wagner, 1993).

A few British ethnographic researchers were working contemporaneously with us, although they did not necessarily adopt a criminological focus (see for example Hutson and Liddiard, 1994). In North America the focus shifted during the 1980s towards a mainly quantitative pers...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 Researching homelessness
• 2 From vagabondage to homelessness
• 3 Representing homelessness and crime
• 4 The unaccommodated woman
• 5 Homelessness and victimisation
• 6 Regulating homeless spaces
• Bibliography
• Index