Youth homelessness: A social justice approach

Homelessness, subjectivity, neoliberalism and stigma

The most recent review by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) calculated that people aged under 35 years account for 60% (19,311) of those who are homeless (ABS, 2012). The enumeration of homelessness is an important policy tool because it contributes to systems-based governmental action, the distribution of material resources, and the delivery of services. The quantification of homelessness, however, needs to be considered alongside methodologies and policies that explore less visible experiences of homelessness, and that engage with its social, cultural and political dimensions (Farrugia and Gerrard, 2013). Otherwise, there is the risk of perpetuating the focus on restricted and inadequate representations of homelessness that merely emphasise ‘deviance’ from mainstream society. Homelessness is identified in this article as more than being without a home; it is also the experience of material inequality and cultural marginalisation that occurs within specific political, social and welfare landscapes (Farrugia and Watson, 2011). The ways in which homelessness is framed has repercussions for how it is approached, and the interventions that are favoured (Zufferey, 2016). If the focus of homelessness is only on housing (and certainly we are not suggesting that this be ignored) then analysis and policy responses are limited to the distribution of material goods. There is long-standing institutional recognition in Australia that structural factors contribute to homelessness, most significantly in recent times in the Rudd government’s White Paper, The Road Home: A National Approach to Reducing Homelessness (Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, 2008). Despite this, dominant perceptions of homelessness remain fixed in neoliberal discourses that primarily hold individuals to account for the conditions of their lives (Farrugia, 2010; Watson, 2016). Furthermore, Australian policy has not been sufficiently developed or resourced to tackle both inadequate housing supply and the broader problems associated with poverty (Parsell and Marston, 2012). While increasing housing supply is essential, it does not fully address the underlying social problems and the lack of social legitimacy that are associated with poverty. Accessing and maintaining stable housing is a complex relational process that is connected to other domains such as family, institutions, peers, education and employment (Mayock et al., 2011), and this needs to be recognised for change to occur. The Housing First model, although contested, that has been used in Australia, North America and Europe goes some way to shifting how the needs of homeless people are understood through the premise that stable housing is a human right, and that once it is established then other matters such as health, education and employment can be addressed. However, we argue that the identification of social problems needs to go further and recognise how multiple and complex oppressions that occur due to the intersection of structures such as age, class, gender, ethnicity/race, sexuality, ability, religion and place, and the associated effects of stigma and social exclusion, shape subjectivities and entrench people in homelessness.

The concept of subjectivity has multiple meanings and is used for varied purposes. Here, we apply Skeggs’ (1997: 12) definition of subjectivity, whereby the construction of subjectivity involves ‘the conditions of being subjected to frameworks of regulation, knowledge and discourse’. This is closely aligned with the idea of subject position, which is how a person connects with, or rejects, discourses generated through societal institutions (for example, systems of education, welfare, media, the workforce) and reflects how a person performs and belongs (Skeggs, 1997). The notion of recognition is crucial to forming stable and sustainable subjectivities, and comes from being able to locate oneself through subject positions within existing discourses. This requires experiences to be accepted as legitimate. Recognition is, therefore, dependent on being able to access the symbolic structures of knowledge through which identification with others occurs (Skeggs, 2001).

Young homeless people, however, are categorised and controlled through an array of stigmatising discourses that have arisen from neoliberal conditions that inevitably shape their subjectivities. In Australia, as in many advanced liberal democracies, over the past 40 years there has been a shift from a welfare-focused economy to a neoliberal market-oriented economy. Activities such as education, health, housing, welfare and transport that were once considered to be the territory of the public sector are now considered by government to be more efficiently and effectively managed by market processes. Neoliberalism, with its retreat of the state, has not only affected economic policy and the distribution of wealth, it has also permeated other aspects of life with the promotion of self-capitalisation and self-regulation as a matter of individual responsibility and choice (Rose, 1999). Ideas of self-capitalisation, individual responsibility and entrepreneurialism now frame the attitudes expected from young people by key institutions and programs in society (e.g. education institutions, workplaces, welfare, unemployment assistance programs). These expected attitudes are harder to take up for young people lacking the appropriate social, human, cultural and economic capital. Failure to adopt these neoliberal sensibilities of entrepreneurialism and responsibilisation (Kelly, 2006), and self-capitalisation (Rose, 1999) further disadvantages those already marginalised, generating a cycle of social exclusion and stigma.

Stigma is the result of a person’s individual attributes being perceived as different and undesirable (Bradley-Engen, 2011). The stigmatised person is unfavourably categorised as other or deviant and her/his exchangeable value is lessened. As Goffman (1991: 3–5) argues, the person’s identity is spoiled and she/he is no longer whole but instead ‘tainted’ and ‘not quite human’. Stigmatised people are further excluded from the dominant group due to fear of contamination. The stigmatised individual is located in what Butler (1993: xiii) refers to as ‘the zone of uninhabitability’, where she/he has no status in social life. This position is solidified by neoliberal rhetoric that holds individuals responsible for their own circumstances regardless of systemic breakdown or structural disadvantage. Similarly, Farrugia (2010) makes the case that there is a symbolic burden associated with homelessness that is embodied in young homeless people’s subjectivities. This symbolic burden represents the connection of moral failure and worthlessness with homelessness which causes suffering and disempowerment. For young people, the stigma of homelessness has been linked to mental health problems, suicidal ideation, loneliness, low self-esteem and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness (Kidd, 2007). We turn now to an analysis of Young’s theory of justice and its usefulness for understanding youth homelessness and subjectivity construction.

The idea of justice

Young’s philosophical project, entrenched in the tradition of feminism and critical theory, transcended the liberal egalitarian paradigm that equates justice with the proper distribution of material goods; that is, with the dimension of distributive justice. A central challenge made to distributive justice by Young (1990: 34) was the argument that the mere delivery of resources as the panacea for social problems tends to mask from the debate the relevance of ‘procedural issues of participation in deliberation and decision making’. Thus, the structural and institutional processes by which distribution of benefits and duties is arranged are often overlooked. A social justice approach that focuses exclusively on distributive matters fails to examine adequately the causes and effects of homelessness by not only neglecting structural disadvantage but also by disregarding issues around empowerment, participation and decision-making in individuals’ lives. Young argued that this lack of participation in deliberation and decision-making is a recipe for inadequate and inappropriate solutions for a complex social problem such as homelessness. This is particularly so because many of the decisions and policies about social injustice are presented from an impartial standpoint—seemingly a view from nowhere (Nagel, 1986); however, in actuality, they are constructed from the viewpoint of dominant groups to be applied to any individual regardless of their social background.

Central to Young’s (1990) proposition of pluralising justice was the notion that a construction of social justice fixed in impartiality tends to homogenise an individual’s social circumstances by removing any social particularities. Young (1990: 98) followed Adorno’s (1973) ‘logic of identity’ in challenging moral reasoning that denies difference at the interior of society, which views ‘entities in terms of substance rather than process or relation’. This normative ideal reduces different experiences to a totality by eliminating contextual, affective and bodily experiences in favour of unity, which can be measured, counted, and sustained by moral reasoning. For Adorno, experience is part of the reality of the social world, and this impartial moral reasoning that aims to unify moral subjects fails to eliminate the different feelings and interests of individuals. Young links this normative ideal, sustained by an impartial and universal view, with a politics of distribution. She argues that a supposedly universal and neutral moral standpoint serves to legitimate the bureaucratic control and the process of distribution which subsequently determines who gets what. Furthermore, this homogeneity is not only blind to difference, one of Young’s primary concerns, but also contributes to the development of a negative sense of self by the oppressed groups (Young here discusses women, Native Americans and African Americans but her ideas are also applicable to people experiencing homelessness) as they fail to conduct and construct a self that aligns with the norms imposed by the dominant group. Thus, for Young, there is a need to enlarge societal understandings of justice from a politics of distribution to a politics of recognition (Young, 1990, 1997, 2001).

It is this heterogeneity of injustice that has remained a central concern in Young’s oeuvre, particularly understood as domination and oppression. Domination, in Young’s terms, as a form of injustice, should be understood as those instances in which institutional norms deny some individuals or social groups the possibility to decide their actions while allowing others a greater freedom and autonomy to do so. Oppression appears as a form of injustice when some individuals or groups are systematically denied, through institutional processes, the possibility to learn and implement their capabilities. The negation of recognition means that these individuals or groups are therefore not allowed to exercise their ability to interact and construct relationships with others or express their own concerns about issues that matter to them. For Young (1990), domination and oppression can only be overcome through a politics of recognition that entails democratisation of decision-making processes and institutions that control them. This requires the construction of a public sphere that is plural and based on diversity and participation. Thus, socially just approaches to homelessness demand an appropriate distribution of resources but also the respect and promotion of the values and perspectives of different social groups (e.g. young homeless people) and the opening up of spaces of decision-making for these disadvantaged groups in society. These spaces of empowerment, self-development and participation need to be underpinned by a politics of difference that pluralises social justice by eliminating hegemonic discourses that uphold neutrality and impartiality.

Research methods

This article draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews that were conducted with 15 young women aged between 18 and 25 who were living in Melbourne, Australia. Ethical approval to undertake the research was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Committees at both the University of Melbourne and the Victorian Department of Human Services. All the participants had experienced homelessness and were recruited through homelessness services that provided transitional housing in the form of short- and medium-term subsidised accommodation. The participants had varied and multiple experiences of homelessness, including couch surfing (temporarily staying with friends, family or acquaintances), youth refuges, sleeping rough and short-term stays in rooming houses or private hotels.

The participants were asked about various aspects of the experience of homelessness such as relationships, identity, support, service provision, and the everyday management of material deprivation and social marginalisation. They provided rich accounts of their lives that detailed many aspects of the homeless experience and the focus of this article will be on their discussion of material and non-material aspects of social exclusion.

Following each participant’s agreement, the interview was recorded and later transcribed in full for further analysis. The participants provided their own pseudonyms to protect anonymity. The transcripts were analysed according to well-established principles of qualitative data analysis (e.g. Denzin and Lincoln, 2011; Neuman, 2011). In addition to immersion in the data through several readings of the transcripts in their entirety and subsequent manual analysis of the data, the qualitative data management software programme NVIVO was used to support the organisation of the themes and examination of the data. The data was coded according to preliminary themes and then further coding was implemented as patterns and conceptual relationships emerged. Care was taken, however, so that the employment of coding did not detract from the broader narratives being given by the participants about their lives.

Materialism, stigma and selfhood

The participants were asked about their needs while they were homeless and the assistance that they had received. Their responses suggested that they required a combination of material and non-material support. With regards to the material aspects, Angela stated that ‘the services themselves, I think, are doing a really fantastic, great job’, but added, ‘I don’t think there’s enough funding.’ Elle described the impact that material deprivation had on her sense of self: ‘I suffer with anxiety and stuff so I get that pretty bad and that’s probably from moving around and having such a chaotic life. And just to find somewhere to stay for at least a year, it’s all I ask sometimes.’ Being female, alone and without a home exacerbates social isolation. It also has implications for physical safety due to the high prevalence of gender-based violence in the homeless sphere (Murray, 2011). For some participants, like Elle, it was easier to manage the material deprivation and physical threat alone because being with another person, such as an intimate partner, made the experience of being homeless more complicated, ‘Cause being homeless is like a fulltime job out there’ and being with someone else ‘was just a waste of time’. For others, like Hayley, it was easier to withstand the material deprivation of homelessness and gender-based violence with an intimate partner because ‘I’m too scared to be alone out there. I’d have to find a boyfriend because you need that company. I just felt like I needed that, someone to kiss and hug you when it is freezing cold and you have no blankets, no nothing.’ Although, this did not necessarily reduce her feelings of social isolation because, ‘I could never talk to them about my problems because I looked at them and thought, they’ve got enough of their own shit, why do they need to hear mine?’

This interconnectivity between material deprivation and social isolation was discussed by Nikita in relation to the estrangement that occurred from her family and friends. When asked about what it felt like to be homeless, Nikita responded:

A lot of it was covered up by the drugs, ’cause I was using a lot, and I was pretty lonely. […] I didn’t really think about [being homeless] and the more I would think about it the more I’d use. So it was just a pretty lonely, horrible place. […] Family had always tried to help and that made relationships really rocky at one stage. And then, the people that I’d hung around with, my friends, were all getting on with their lives and working. These were friends that I’d grown up with and gone to school with and weren’t on the drugs. Friendships sort of drifted. Everything was affected really. […] Everything’s just sort of scrounging. It’s just sort of all over the place. There’s no grounding, you know.

For Angela, the disenfranchisement of homelessness not only impacted on her interpersonal relationships, but also on her capacity to navigate the social welfare system. Angela described how the degradation associated with homelessness affected her subjectivity and thus compromised her interactions with support services to the point that they ceased to be a resource for her: ‘I felt pretty helpless. I knew that there were services out there but I’d just been there and done that so many times that I really didn’t have a lot of self-esteem, […] it’s pretty degrading actually.’ Angela’s experience shines a light on the role that stigma plays in sustaining the oppression of young homeless people. Stigma can result in exclusion from societal institutions and networks that assist with employment, accommodation and social connectivity, which, in turn, renders the distribution of material resources ineffective. Angela further reflected on how the inherent social exclusion of homelessness contributed to this stigmatisation and deepened her sense of marginalisation from mainstream society producing an internalised and individualised moral judgement of her self-worth:

It lowered my self-esteem. I didn’t feel like I was part of the community in any way, shape or form. I felt like scum, basically, because I couldn’t hold or maintain any housing. I couldn’t live like a normal person would. And having drug addictions in between, just speed and pot, yeah, it made things even worse because I had to have pot constantly. […] People kept thinking I was a prostitute and I wasn’t, which I thought was very discriminating. Just because I’m a young, homeless woman […] does not necessarily mean that I’m going to go out selling my body for drugs.

A lack of participation in the labour market, isolation from social networks, and disconnection from the community, disturbed Angela’s subjectivity. In Angela’s words, she ceased to be ‘part of the community in any way, shape or form’, situating her in Butler’s ‘zone of uninhabitability’. These messages were imprinted on Angela who bore a sense of failure because she was unable to sustain stable accommodation and, accordingly, ‘felt like scum’. At play in Angela’s, Nikita’s and other participants’ stories is a sense of them feeling what Young (2006) would call ‘deviant’, by being unable to display the adequate behaviour demanded by social institutions. Further, the expectation by others that sex was an exchangeable commodity due to their being young, female and homeless was a frustration expressed by other participants and reflected a dissonance between their authentic selves and how they were perceived and treated by others.

The power of stigma was so strong that some participants described disguising their homelessness from people they knew in order to avoid being subjected to their negative judgements. Lexi moved to Australia from Ethiopia when she was a child and she became homeless following the breakdown of a foster care placement. Homelessness interrupted Lexi’s life, however she still managed to continue with her tertiary education and practice the Ethiopian Orthodox religion. Although Lexi was powerless to change her material circumstances, she discussed how avoiding the label of ‘homeless’ was a matter of self-protection and survival:

And sometimes it’s good to keep our life as a secret because then no-one will know how to get you, no-one will know how to hurt you. But when you tell people, and people tell it to other people, that’s how the rumours go around and people will start looking at you as a different person just because you don’t have a home. And the word ‘homeless’ does actually kill. It does affect you inside. […] People make it sound as if it’s your fault. You’re making your life in hell but, really, it’s not your fault. You just have no choice.

Lexi’s decision not to reveal her situation showed that she was aware of the stigma that is attached to people who are homeless. She had experienced first-hand how neoliberal discourses place the blame on individuals for their circumstances (‘People make it sound as though it’s your fault’). The impact of homelessness extended beyond the material to affect Lexi emotionally to the point that she aligned homelessness with her personhood being figuratively killed. According to Giddens (1991: 193), individuals who feel powerless to manage their personal and social environments experience a ‘survival’ mentality; however, the act of survival in personal and social terms, is itself an indication of mastery. By choosing not to disclose her circumstances, Lexi attempted to destabilise dominant neoliberal discourses regarding homelessness and to resist being subjectively positioned as failing to adopt expected youth dispositions (e.g. self-capitalisation, entrepreneurialism) that enhance social inclusion. Following Young’s (2006: 99) theorisation, Lexi aimed to resist the stigmatisation that is placed on homeless people because they fail to produce ‘ways of living of particular social segments (which) are held as a standard’. She was able to hold this position due to her strong ties with her extended family living in Ethiopia and through her ongoing participation in religion and education. Lexi’s negotiation of these discourses points to the varied ways in which young homeless people constantly have to manage and perform their subject positions, amid a fear of judgement and with scarce material and non-material resources. This success of the performance, such as Lexi hiding being homeless, is shaped by the diverse and intersectional factors that structure young homeless lives.

Recognitional justice and youth homelessness

The participants emphasised that non-material resources were also needed to assist with homelessness. Amina, who had migrated to Australia from Somalia, spoke of the significance of the recognition of age and cultural/ethnic factors for young people born overseas, and how the lack of this contributed to homelessness and its associated problems such as drug use. Amina noted the importance of young people being able to participate actively in their communities, so that their needs are acknowledged and so that they can contribute to the institutions that offer support.

A lot of people come from overseas, like Africa, and a lot of people who don’t work with young people expect them to integrate and pick up quickly whereas they can’t and they stress out. They start smoking and they’re drug addicts and people say, oh my god, they lost their roots. […] Regardless of where they come from or who there are, young people as a whole need older people to understand them. And we need more young people to actually be involved in organisations.

Likewise, Hayley spoke of the importance of institutions taking the time to listen and recognise the needs of young people experiencing homelessness. She argued that the support services should not have to wait for young people experiencing homelessness to seek them out but that young people need to be actively recruited and supported in making decisions about their lives:

A lot of people won’t make decisions and do things that they do now if they had an opportunity to talk to someone else or to go somewhere instead of having to be in that situation. I just think there should be a lot more awareness about homelessness and that when you are homeless there is help, and there are places you can go to, and there are people you can talk to. […] And [support services] can help you out with so many things, not just housing, like emotional difficulty and health.

Hayley articulated that support services need to offer an environment that is based on the principles of recognitional justice; that they need to provide a space where all social groups are able to express their views in their own way (e.g. narratives, stories) and in their own idiom (voice) (Young, 2001). Drawing on Young (1990: 155), Amina and Hayley argue for the ‘affirmation of a positive identity’ for those marginalised in society. Disrupting oppression and domination entails remedying inequalities in material distribution as well as cultural recognition of, and respect for, all subjectivities, and opening up spaces of participation that are meaningful for marginalised groups. Moreover, the services need to be voluntary, participatory and supportive, and offer a range of material and non-material resources. Thus, there was awareness in the participants of the relevance of appropriate distribution of material resources (i.e. ‘places you can go to’) but also that, without the recognition of how intersecting structures shape different subjectivities, housing spaces might just become a temporary oasis for stigmatised lives. Bianca spoke further of the importance of services not adhering to stigmatised notions of homeless people and to recognise everyone’s individual circumstances. When discussing the youth homelessness agency that she was involved with, Bianca said:

They give you so much good advice. They treat every single person as an individual. Everyone there has their own problems and that’s it, doesn’t matter who or what you look like or where you’re from. It doesn’t matter, everybody’s welcome there.

Bianca’s gender, for example, had a direct consequence on her housing situation. She became homeless when she was pregnant because her mother, with whom she was living, was moving in with her intimate partner and this housing had no space for a baby. Although Bianca was in a relationship with the baby’s father, he lived with his mother and that accommodation proved to be unsuitable for a baby. Through this agency Bianca’s specific needs as a homeless young woman with a baby were met through accessing appropriate accommodation, joining a young mothers’ group, and receiving health, social and peer support. Similarly, Hayley described a range of material, psychological and social support that she had obtained or knew about from the same agency:

They will help out with eating disorders if you have that. I was sick with bulimia and they helped out with that. Anything. I’m getting $1000 youth relief grant for leaving home early. I never would have found that out if it wasn’t for [the youth homelessness agency]. They do JPET [Job Placement, Employment and Training Program] with Centrelink so then you don’t have to go into Centrelink and deal with all their shit. […] They help you out with doctors […] psychologists, anything you need, clothing, young mothers that are trying to have children. They’re supportive, helpful. They give you a lot of information. They help you out. Anything. School, if you want to do Year 11, if you want to go to university, if you want to go be a bricklayer, go [there] and they’ll help you out, and they’ll lead you in the right direction. They’ve got help for everybody.

Hayley and Bianca’s observations reveal that homelessness services are not only essential for the material resources that they deliver but also for the sense of inclusion and recognition that they provide for the varied needs of individuals and groups. This is supported by other research (e.g. Robinson, 2011; Shier et al., 2011) that found that drop-in and accommodation services were sites where homeless people could find acceptance and a sense of community in addition to accessing resources. Robinson (2011: 120), in particular, found that these services offer young people a ‘basic bridge across the transitional gap between childhood and adulthood’. This highlights the importance of providing an environment which buffers against the dominant neoliberal discourses that stigmatise young homeless people. An environment is needed that challenges and interrupts universal norms that work towards stigmatising certain groups based on difference—that involves alternative ways of being, sexuality and even different kinds of bodies (Young, 1990, 2006). Both Hayley and Bianca experienced disadvantage associated with homelessness that was compounded by their status as young women. However, within a non-judgemental community environment, Hayley was able to seek support for bulimia, a highly gendered mental illness, as well as return to school. Bianca, who commented on the stigma she had experienced as a young mother, was able to share her experiences with peers, get advice, and was supported in raising her child.

The problem with the politics of distribution in homelessness

The participants’ experiences of material deprivation, stigma and social exclusion resonate with Young’s challenge to impartial and universal views of what it means to belong to a society or community. Stigmatisation, for Young (2006: 96), is produced through processes of normalisation ‘that construct experience and capacities of some social segments into standards against which all are measured and some found wanting, or deviant’. The participants in this study were unable to exhibit the type of attributes expected by social institutions and community members due to being homeless. In Young’s (1997) view, the importance of the material is based on the possibility of having control over one’s personal space (both material and emotional), which enables the creation and sustainability of one’s subject position, including the ability to invite any individuals into, or turn them away, from this space. The control of the privacy of one’s physical and emotional space, which was absent for the participants in this study, is a condition sine qua non for the construction and consolidation of one’s subjectivity through empowerment, autonomy and self-esteem. However, Young would argue, the problem here is the focus on the young people’s unsuccessful deployment of the correct attitudes desired by key social institutions, rather than placing the accent on the institutions and practices that have shaped their subject position as homeless individuals. The effect of this can be observed in Angela saying that she felt like ‘scum’ due to her sense of failure.

When the distribution of material resources is viewed as the panacea for all social ills, individuals are positioned as merely ‘possessors and consumers of goods’, passive recipients of goods, and issues of power, self-respect and autonomy are overlooked thus ignoring social and institutional contexts that establish distributive patterns (Young, 1990: 16). Overcoming the limitations of social policy that relies primarily on the distributive dimension of homelessness support entails, for example, reflecting the values and perspectives of different social groups in this situation, paying specific attention to gender inequalities and vulnerabilities, and promoting decision-making power for socially disadvantaged groups in the different structures of the homelessness process. Moreover, Young stressed that the empowerment and self-respect of an oppressed group will depend on constructing a positive image, particularly from the inside of these groups, against dominant views that portray these people as problematic and deviant. As Bianca and Hayley described above, the construction of an empowered and autonomous self was greatly assisted by welfare services that offered inclusivity and validation of non-traditional life stories. Empowering the cultural meanings and the decision-making power of all social groups is a critical condition for a socially just society (Young, 1990, 1997).

Young has been accused of focusing on difference for difference’s sake (Barry, 2001) and of displacing issues of socioeconomic redistribution in favour of cultural recognition (Fraser, 2008). However, Young (1990, 2008) is clear that access to material resources is critical in the development of the lives of those who are oppressed. She stated that she was not calling for ‘recognition as an end in itself’ but rather an acknowledgement that cultural recognition is ‘a means to economic and political justice’ (Young, 2008: 91). Young’s point was that disrupting the reification of distributive justice as the panacea for all inequalities and injustices never meant that cultural recognition should be the answer for all claims. As Natalier and Johnson argue (2012), safe and affordable housing provides a buffer against social marginalisation for young people. It can also produce better access to other resources that improve material conditions, such as education and employment (Mayock et al., 2011). As noted by the participants in this research, access to material resources was critical to their selfhood and self-determination. Similarly, the reduction in their material resources through homelessness was intrinsically connected to their depletion of self-worth.

The role of a politics of difference in disrupting normative young lives

Social justice propositions that do not consider the heterogeneity of injustices, and of those harmed by these, tend to offer a view of the social world that is far from neutral and is, rather, the reflection of those groups that control access to, and the process of, distribution of material goods. Such propositions generate processes of normalisation of behaviours, attitudes and aspirations; and anybody outside the normative realm is seen as deviant or at risk (Young, 2001). As research by Zufferey and Kerr (2004: 349) indicates, lack of recognition of the complexity of factors that shape homelessness and create unique experiences results in homeless people interpreting their interactions with support services as being between ‘us and them’. This separation of ‘us and them’ also serves another purpose, through the systemic and cultural othering of the homeless which supports the construction of homelessness as a societal anomaly rather than as an enduring and integral feature of society (Gerrard and Farrugia, 2014). If homelessness is perceived as an irregularity then it can be blamed on the faultiness or misconduct of the individual.

In her prolific work, Young (1997) argued in favour of the material space of a home, of a place, which is critical in developing meaningful experiences of belonging beyond the public and private interference of others. Autonomy, as well as empowerment and self-respect, are critical conditions for the construction of Young’s politics of difference for marginalised members of society. These conditions are reflected in the participants’ observations, such as Hayley’s comment on the need for ‘emotional’ support and Bianca’s on services having to ‘treat every single person as an individual’. The development of personal autonomy, self-respect and empowerment for all individuals is seen by Young as the necessary condition for building a subjectivity that does not become a prisoner of homogenising views of the social world that are hard to reach for some. This homogeneous construction of an impersonal and transcendent subject eliminates any social particularity and thus contributes to the systematic discrimination of young homeless people who are generally stigmatised as being at risk, marginal and abnormal. Consequently, the positive affirmation of the complex identities of marginalised and oppressed social groups, and recognition of their struggle, is paramount in redressing processes of institutional and individual stigmatisation.

Conclusion

Responses to homelessness, of course, need to include the provision of material support; however, a social justice approach that only focuses on the distribution of goods ignores the significance of the non-material aspects of homelessness that maintain oppression. This includes the impact of the stigmatisation that results from the dominant discourses of neoliberalism, whereby notions of self-capitalisation and individualism are prioritised over collective responsibility for structural disadvantage and systemic breakdown. This marks young homeless people, in particular, as societal failures for being unable to adopt and display the correct dispositions favoured by key societal institutions. Young has argued for a politics of distribution to be the main paradigm for understanding the foundation of social injustices; what is understood as social justice can provide a very superficial analysis of institutional injustices by overlooking fundamental issues that structure society and the decision-making processes. The participants’ experiences of homelessness in this study depict how the recognition of oppression and domination based on structures such as age, gender and culture, rather than a politics of redistribution, better identify the constraints that institutional norms place on some individuals’ and social groups’ actions, on their capability to act according to their desires and to interact with others, by repressing their feelings and their social views of the world. Oppression relates to those injustices that are made possible due to everyday life practices that might seem harmless but that erode the self-esteem, and thus the opportunities, of those who are most vulnerable in society. Oppression and domination, rather than social justice that is solely distributive and that is based on a fictitiously neutral merit, enables a better scrutinising of how institutional mechanisms, processes and strategies reinforce social inequality. Only by modifying everyday practices, cultural symbols and institutional practices we can start to redress systematic violence and exclusion to some social groups.