Becoming Homelessness In Canada

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In Canada, there are over 200,000 homeless persons who are living on the street or do not have a place to call home in a given year (Gaetz, Dej, Richter & Redman, 2016). Their marginal existence captures media’s attention occasionally in selected crises and fades away with limited public concern about their plight. The homeless are being named as “derelicts”, “hobos” or even “degenerate bums” since they are viewed through the stereotypical lens of personal failures. What are the catalysts that propel someone into homelessness? This paper argues that homelessness is stemmed from the structural forces rather than individual pathologies. The first paragraph illustrates that vagrancy is a socially produced phenomenon that is deeply and insidiously …show more content…
The homeless person may be in an unhealthy relationship or financial crisis where they act as push factors to homelessness. Undoubtedly, stressful life events provide some explanations on why homeless persons end up wandering on the street. That said, some argue that the homeless are, indeed the authors of their own fate while the government and charitable organizations are already involved in ameliorating the poverty-stricken conditions of the homeless. Most of the individuals who undergo Gordian knot similar to the homeless do not turn out to sleep on the street or become a couch surfer. Therefore, homelessness is more akin to a state of personal choice than the results of the larger societal factors. Pursuing this line of reasoning, since the problem is a private problem as opposed to a social problem, it is believed to be the individual’s responsibility and not the responsibility of the society to do the …show more content…
Those aforementioned stressful life events that encountered by the homeless are stemmed from the systemic factors. Take, for example, the relationship between ill mental health and homelessness can be caused by the changing socio-economic circumstances in the society. As a result, blaming the victims for their personal failings and criminalizing homelessness are similar to shifting the negative conditions from social to personal. Fook asserts that efforts should be placed on distinguishing how socio-economic structures provoke individual difficulties (as cited in Olivier, 2010). The overreliance on individual pathologies as an explanation to homelessness is questionable. Gray and Fook (2004) also ascertain that without a contextually oriented perspective, one can only discern a problem homogeneously while neglecting the heterogeneous facet of an issue. The term homeless can portray a wide range of individuals and families who are encountering distinct adversities. Chronic homelessness cannot be eradicated if the heterogeneous nature of the homeless population is not taken into account. The case in point would be the homeless includes a variety of sub-populations, such as youth, Indigenous people, women,
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