HOMELESSNESS MEN FINDING AVAILABLE HEALTH CARE

Homelessness Men Finding Available Health Care



Homelessness Men Finding Available Health Care

Introduction

The present paper examines in depth some of the inner practices of various normative institutions, namely morality, family, and the prison and uncovers the ways in which they operate in producing acute states of social and moral disempowerment, and how they affect the faculties of subordinate members to competently fend for themselves in the wider society. Previous research has made it clear that homelessness is a social condition that finds its origins in structural causes such as poverty, lack of affordable housing, chronic unemployment, and reductions in welfare support. In the United States, as in virtually every country in the world, more boys than girls are born each year. However, infant males are more likely to die in their first year of life than infant females. This pattern persists over the entire life course. In this paper we will describe a complex set of social forces that converge to adversely influence the health of men by using previous studies. We will describe the magnitude of increased health risks for men, the social determinants of these disparities, and the ways in which social practices can be changed to improve the health of men.

Literature review

The study of homelessness usually precedes either from a socio-economic or ethnographic perspective. In the first case, homelessness is understood as being the result of reforms in welfare and taxation, changes in urban planning and housing policy, unemployment, and of trends such as gentrification (Palen and London, 1984; Dear and Wolch, 1987; Kusmer, 2002). On its part, the ethnographic approach focuses on the everyday routines of the homeless and especially on how these excluded persons form social networks and manage to survive on the street (Liebow, 1993; Wagner, 1993; Desjarlais, 1999; Gowan, 1997).

It is found to be true of course, that academic researchers and public authorities alike have identified and registered the association between domestic abuse and deinstitutionalization and homelessness (Dear and Wolch, 1987). However, most policies directed at ex-inmates and victims of gender violence simply aim at fulfilling their transitional needs mostly housing, health, and work. Take for instance, Project Greenlight, a USA scheme whose broad aim in addressing re-entry issues for ex-inmates does not contain a single reference to possible faults taking place within the institutional framework of the criminal justice system, which may necessarily be in the need of revision in order to reduce ex-convicts' rates of homelessness (Rodríguez and Brown 2003). The same limitation is evident in Brown's (2004) study of Parole Officers views on the needs of newly released offenders.

Morality

Two pairs of concepts, purity-pollution and normal-stigmatized, will serve us as a theoretical base upon which to approach the wide-ranging phenomena of discrimination, violence, and hatred towards the homeless population.

Douglas (2002) argues that historically and across cultures, people's search for purity responds to a complex symbolic system emphasizing unity of experience and clear categories and which strongly rejects all those human and natural expressions that, due ...