A new Learning Lounge course launching on 5 December explores the drivers and impact of stigma. Homelessness Stigma; a conversation is an interactive, half-day course which will give you the skills and confidence you need to challenge the pervasive stigma around homelessness.
By the end of the session, participants will be able to reflect on the power dynamics in their work, identify stereotypes in representations of homelessness, use positive framing to reduce stigma, and learn about the barriers people accessing services face, including stigma.
In this blog, Homeless Network Scotland Associate David Pentland sets out why we need this course and how it can benefit everyone.
Stigma is pervasive and insidious, and it can be held by anyone regardless of their good intentions.
The judgments we make about people are often subconscious and rarely malicious. But we need to challenge our conditioning and fears, to overcome the bias we hold, making it easier to treat every person we meet or work with equally and fairly.
To combat the unconscious bias we experience we must confront the issue head-on by conversing and exploring its nature, without any judgment.
We want to help people understand unconscious bias. It’s really an unconscious reaction to fear, based on vulnerabilities that frighten us.
It’s important to note that this course is not ‘training’ – that’s why it’s called ‘Stigma: a conversation’. It’s a space to explore in safety and get in touch with how bias works and identify some of the subtle directions it whispers at us from.
‘Many people will be too ashamed to go into the homelessness system’
Stigma is everywhere and you see it in the media through the use of images of people sleeping rough and beggars to represent homelessness. Only a very small minority of overall homelessness involves rough sleeping.
The impact these pictures has is that people experiencing homelessness who aren’t sleeping rough may feel they are falling into that stigmatised category. The more that imagery is used, the more stigmatised the majority of people experiencing homelessness feel.
That can stop people from speaking up and asking for help. And it colours the way family and friends see them, because everyone reacts to imagery. Everyone gets locked into that image even if it’s not necessarily a true representation of where they are in life.
This can transfer into a feeling of shame. That adds to hidden homelessness, as many people will be too ashamed to go into homeless system. Instead they’ll be staying with friends or sofa surfing.
This conversation also covers the equality aspect. There’s a well-worn saying that ‘everyone is two paychecks away from homelessness’.
That’s not true – the risk is not equal for everyone. In the session we expand on some of the life experiences and factors like a lack of social connections that make people more vulnerable to homelessness.
The more of those experiences you have – like adverse childhood experiences, being a care leaver, having a background of poverty – the more likely you are to become homeless when you encounter financial difficulty.
When you add in factors like addiction, more avenues of stigma are opening up.
‘Everyone deserves an equal service’
Sometimes in services people cycling through the system experience stigma and end up being excluded from support. Staff can be burned out and can react badly.
One of my worst experiences was entering a service in Edinburgh to be greeted by a member of staff saying, “Not you again? What is it?” I left and never went back! That’s the harm stigma can cause. It turns people looking for support away at the door, with untold consequences.
This course was created by a rough sleeper of 15 years who suffered severe and multiple disadvantage and lived in so much chaos no service would work with him. All except one person.
That person – that service – helped him to recalibrate his life. He went on to work as a frontline worker and even spent two years as a policy officer in the Scottish Government.
We want people to come away from the session realising that everybody deserves an equal service irrespective of where they come from or how they present, and everybody deserves to live without the toxicity of stigma present in their life.
Stigma is out there and it is killing more people who are homeless than you might think. Come join our conversation – you might help a lost cause get their life back.
