Several times this past month I have noted media discussions about homelessness which determinedly avoided the elephant in the dormitory. The context of these discussions was principally the fact that recently the Housing Initiative, a statutory partnership under the direction of Dublin Corporation and the Eastern Health Board, published a survey on homelessness in Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow, commissioned from the ESRI.
The survey was conducted over the final week of March 1999, collecting information on gender, age, location and duration of homelessness. Overall, the survey found that there were 2,900 homeless persons in the surveyed area that week, 95 per cent in the Dublin Corporation area and most others in Dublin South, Dun Laoghaire and Fingal, with fewer than 1 per cent in Kildare and Wicklow.
Studied carefully, this survey showed no discernible deviation from what has long been the most fundamental reality of homelessness as commonly understood: that it is primarily a condition affecting adult males. I do not suggest that the survey was deliberately constructed to bury this, but there was certainly an odd compatibility between the construction of the survey and the focus with which the subject was reported and discussed in the media. The only media mentions I noted of a gender dimension were in references to the alleged increase in the numbers of homeless young women.
One of the aspects contributing to the media fudge was that the survey cast its net over a very wide definition of homelessness, embracing two quite different groups: (1) those who utilised services for the homeless, such as hostels and food centres (i.e. the group traditionally defined as homeless); and (2) those on a local authority homeless list.
This latter category comprises people waiting to be housed but not necessarily homeless in the strict sense, since most stay with family or friends. While it is legitimate to draw attention to those who would like houses of their own but have not been able to obtain them, it is somewhat misleading to describe such people as homeless.
If living with friends or relatives is a definition of homelessness, many of us were unwittingly homeless for much of our young adulthoods. I know of at least two former cabinet ministers who, by this definition, were homeless for the duration of their terms of office.
There is, clearly, a fundamental distinction to be made between the two categories: one refers to people who are destitute, not just without a home, but isolated from family, community and society; the other to people who have sought to be defined as homeless with a view to being given preferential treatment in the housing lists.
True homelessness, like suicide, is an area of massive "domination" by men. Even of the overall total of 2,900 people categorised as "homeless" in this survey, 1,850, or 64 per cent, were male. In the category of person who utilised services for the homeless, slightly over 1,000, of the total of 1,350, or 75 per cent, were men.
The only category which approached "equality" was the list of people described as homeless by virtue of being on a local authority list but who did not seek the assistance of services for the homeless in the week in question; here, 54 per cent, or 840 out of 1,550, were male.
The Irish Times report of the survey stated that this group comprised "mostly women with children", but this is not the case. Men were in the majority in all categories of homelessness, but especially of the "traditional" kind.
There is no significant urban centre in the Western hemisphere in which this is not true. In most Western cities on any given night, about 90 per cent of those living rough are men, and Dublin and other Irish urban centres do not deviate from this pattern. In this survey, men who "mainly sleep rough" were found to outnumber women who do so by about eight to one.
The traditional "routes" into homelessness tend to be marriage breakdown, unemployment, release from prison, domestic violence and substance addiction, including alcoholism. In all of these categories, men "dominate". Ninety-five per cent of all prisoners are male. Men are twice as likely as women to be unemployed and about 20 times more likely to be expelled from their homes. Barring orders against men are handed out by the courts in the manner of cocktail sausages at the annual get-together of the Pork and Bacon Commission.
An interesting aspect of this survey was the clear distinction it highlighted between males and females in terms of attachments. The vast majority of male homeless, 87 per cent, were said to have "no dependants". Small percentages of men, 5 and 6 per cent respectively, had partners or partners and children, but only 1 per cent had "children only".
A majority of homeless women (59 per cent), on the other hand, had either partners or children or both. About 20 per cent of women had partners or partners and children, but most (39 per cent) had children but no partners. It is interesting that a significant proportion (21 per cent) of the local authority list comprised couples with and without children, and that, of the remainder, nearly two-thirds of women had children as against about 2 per cent of men.
There was a significant disparity between the proportions of men and women who, while accessing services for the homeless, were also registered on a local authority homeless list. More than 53 per cent of "traditionally" homeless women were also on such a list, as against only 39 per cent of men, indicating that women have a significantly higher expectation of being housed.
As the ESRI report states, the much higher incidence of families with children on the local authorities' lists reflects the priority being given to those with children. The reason women tend to be homeless for, on average, shorter periods than men, the report suggests, may be because "the routes out of homelessness for females are more effective than those available to their male counterparts". Put simply, the fact that an adult has care of a child means that he or she is likely to be moved up the queue for housing. The fact that mostly this means women accounts to a high degree for the imbalance manifested in the statistics for homelessness throughout what is allegedly a male-dominated society. It is clear that children, in this context, function as a "resource" to be used to put roofs over their mothers' heads.
The reason for the evasion of the truth of this matter is that all social policy in this State, feminist rhetoric notwithstanding, is formed according to the tenets of feminist doctrine. To concede that one of the primary indicators of dispossession shows men suffering at a multiple of the rate of women might require the re-evaluation of that ideology. This is such an appalling vista that all right-thinking people feel duty-bound to soft-focus the facts.