Tim Horton Cups & Ball Caps Not The Answer To Homelessness

But neither is the bureaucratic morass that now exists where a declaration of homelessness is enough to get you a kick at the can at the expense of the truly needy. Social assistance was meant to be a temporary safety net but it has turned into a "cottage industry" where we have 2nd, 3rd, ....., generation receiving benefits, kids leaving home, pregnant teenagers, and the list goes on and on.

Compassion alone unlikely to help the homeless TheStar.com - Columnist - Compassion alone unlikely to help the homeless

The weakest and most vulnerable are being victimized while we wallow in tolerance

August 22, 2007

Rosie Dimanno
city columnist

Only the wilfully blind, or obtuse, would deny that the city's downtown core has gone ratty and rancid in the past decade.

It's not only a problem of optics – long swatches of sidewalk taken hostage by increasingly hostile and menacing panhandlers.

Those streets have become disturbingly violent.

The recent murder of a perambulator, allegedly at the hands of a belligerent quartet of itinerant young beggars, was an anomaly. But the casual and persistent battering that's rarely reported is very much an escalating trend: Homeless on homeless assault.

Those rushing to assert the civil rights of indigents to cadge for coins are ignoring the real and miserable plight of those they purport to defend. It's the weakest and most vulnerable who are chronically victimized by bullies a little bit stronger and a lot more antagonistic.

When Beric German, an outreach worker for Street Health, told the Star last week that the destitute are more commonly the targets of assault than the perpetrators of crime, the intent was clearly to create sympathy for those who hang by their fingertips on the edgs of society.

Only the meanest are without sympathy for the dispossessed. But stop-frame compassion – a quarter here, a loonie there – isn't making anybody safer or improving the quality of a single individual's life.

According to a just-completed survey by Street Health, 35 per cent of homeless people reported being assaulted last year, 68 per cent of that group saying they'd been assaulted an average of six times. Those figures contrast sharply with the general population, where less than 1 per cent reported assaults to police in 2005.

The impression left was that the homeless, on top of all their other problems, are being horribly abused. Which is true. But a great deal of the abuse occurs within that community, in large part, I would suggest, because people lose their civility, their humanity, as they become inculcated to a lifestyle of squalor and seediness – the very elements that are inadvertently promoted by wrongheaded tolerance.