The links between homelessness and trauma are explored in a new report to be launched on 15 December 2010 in Sydney.

Learn to listen and know that it is very hard to have no home and expect you to remember a lot of rules when you are traumatised. - Anonymous homeless person, in response to being asked how homeless services could be improved.

Homelessness and trauma

Last year, the Public Interest Advocacy Centre commissioned a social researcher from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Dr Catherine Robinson, to research the experiences of violence among people who are currently rough sleeping. 

Dr Robinson’s report, to be launched next week, is titled Rough Living: Surviving violence and homelessness. It adopts a ‘life-history’ approach, using interviews with 12 individuals currently sleeping rough in the Sydney region. The interviewees speak about their experiences of violence prior to and during their periods of homelessness.

During the course of the research, the enduring impacts of childhood abuse and trauma became apparent.

Of those who participated in the project:

• Eight participants described childhoods marked by their parents’ relationship breakdowns and separation, addiction, mental illness, housing instability, and inability and unwillingness to care for their children.

• Seven participants reported witnessing their parents’ domestic violence and five were also exposed to the physical and sexual abuse of their siblings.

• Eleven participants reported childhood sexual and physical abuse perpetrated mostly by parents and step-parents but also by siblings.  This included sexual abuse, physical torture, physical violence with weapons, physical bashings by punching, slapping and kicking, and neglect. 

• Sexual and physical abuse was accompanied by emotional abuse which usually revolved around participants being told they were useless or unwanted, being threatened with further harm, including murder, and receiving punishment if they questioned abuse or revealed abuse outside the family.  

The report found considerable links between homelessness, child-abuse and trauma.

These findings are confirmed by other research that reveals extremely high rates of childhood sexual, emotional and physical abuse experienced by those who become homeless.

Research has shown that over 70% of young homeless women and 30% of young homeless men can be expected to be survivors of sexual abuse, while 70% of young homeless men and 30% of young homeless women can be expected to be survivors of physical abuse. The number of people experiencing childhood emotional abuse remains harder to quantify.¹

Impacts of trauma

There needs to be a radical shift in the thinking of people who work with vulnerable groups such as homeless people. Abuse that is suffered as a child is not simply a childhood issue. The resultant trauma from childhood sexual, physical and emotional abuse informs the majority of the individual’s interactions into adulthood.

Service providers need to be willing to recognise that a different approach is necessary and to start to examine different practices in service delivery. These changes need to occur at both the point of service contact with homeless people and in service management and development.

Trauma produces certain behaviours and symptoms that can vary in severity. Some of the symptoms and behaviours can include nightmares, dissociation, anxiety, panic or aggressive responses and self-destructive behaviours such as self-harm.

Impacts of service provision

The large number of people experiencing homelessness and trauma means that all services working with this population must have an understanding of trauma and its impact on the individual. This understanding must extend beyond consideration of the kinds of programs that should be provided, into service design and administration.

The participants in Rough Living provided specific detail on how a whole range of services (including specialist homeless services) did not understand nor seek to address the trauma they were experiencing. Participants noted how they felt silenced by service providers in the face of a desperate need to have these experiences recognised and to be assisted to access avenues through which to heal themselves.

When services fail to consider the impacts of trauma on the individual clients, they not only fail to assist with their healing but can also become complicit in their re-traumatisation.  People re-experience trauma not only when they are forced to tell their stories (often over and over again), but frequently in the ways they are treated by the staff of service providers.

For example, speaking in aggressive, confronting or challenging tones is likely to have particular impacts on someone who has experienced emotional or physical abuse.

What next?

In response to Rough Living, PIAC, through the Homeless Persons’ Legal Service*, has formed a working party to specifically address the lack of knowledge about trauma and trauma-informed service delivery.

In order to provide assistance and professional advice, instructions for working with clients experiencing trauma and trauma informed care, HPLS and the working party are hoping to develop a trauma-based training package.  The working group hopes to be able to offer assistance with service design and delivery and practical on-site assistance for staff.

It is hoped that the outcome of this work will be that people who are homeless and experience trauma will receive acknowledgment and services that suit their particular needs.

This story was written by the Homeless Persons’ Legal Service Policy Officer, Chris Hartley. 

Thanks to Dr Catherine Robinson from UTS for providing research material used to formulate this article.

HPLS is a joint initiative of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre and the Public Interest Law Clearing House.

Footnote

1. Lisa Thrane, Dan Hoyt, Les Whitbeck, and Kevin Yoder, ‘Impact of Family Abuse on Running Away, Deviance, and Street Victimization among Homeless Rural and Urban Youth’, (2006) Child Abuse and Neglect, 30 10, 117 

Photo: Flickr/publik16