Please note this blog mentions drug addiction, drug use, and physical abuse (no graphic descriptions) and dehumanisation.
If there was a ‘Dummies’ book on ‘How to marginalise people’, I think the first chapter would be “Name Calling and Labelling”. All you need is to choose a group of people, any group will do, and then opt for a name associated with negatives. A good example is ‘cockroaches’. Nobody wants to hear that cockroaches are near. They are associated with dirt and their presence causes panic. Calling someone a cockroach tells them they are not wanted, and they are sub-human.
Last week, I was speaking to a friend and it occurred to me he is someone we could have called a cockroach when he was younger. His dysfunctional home made him 'a bit of a nightmare' in school and he recalls a particular teacher telling him he was no good, would come to nothing and that the school would have been better off without him. He left school, learned a profession, became a leader and then an entrepreneur and lives very comfortably using his time these days to mentor others. Not bad for a cockroach! Of course, he wasn’t marginalised, but so easily could’ve been. This time the process failed.
A week before that I was talking to someone at our Project about the ‘labelling’ that comes hand in hand with homelessness and realised he was prime ‘cockroach’ material. He’s been to prison, he was addicted to heroin and spent time begging and sleeping on the street. I know he’s prime material because the words ‘cockroaches’ and ‘scrotes’ were used in meetings I was at to describe all these characteristics, to describe people who are the bottom of our society and already marginalised. They were talking about people who are street homeless in the city centre.
At The Project he had said to me, “Tim, you’ve got to practise the gratitude. Every day I say ‘no’ to the drugs and 'yes' to good stuff. I even say thanks every time I sit to eat.” We weren’t talking about his past, it was just an everyday chat, but a clear reminder of the hard work that continues in a life after homelessness.
He was marginalised but now he isn’t. De-marginalisation is a more important activity and it starts with listening and empathy. It isn’t easy. In this case, listening and trying to understand did remarkable things. The person I’m writing about had a childhood of fear. His mum was an alcoholic and his series of stepfathers were abusers. As a child, he didn’t know what he would find at home. Maybe no-one would be there. Or, perhaps, they would be drunk or stoned. Or, it would be violent, his mum being beaten and the danger of him being beaten too. Living in fear shaped him mentally and physically. He developed advanced survival instincts focusing on the immediate and not the long term. His brain lived in ‘ready to fight’ mode, scanning constantly for threats to his safety. There was no real downtime. Creativity, long term planning, or the development of skills that don’t have an immediate use – there wasn’t space for these in the world he lived in. He didn’t know most of us had time for stuff other than surviving. And that’s what led to him becoming a ‘cockroach’.
Being heard and understood helped change all of that. Is he employed? Absolutely. Does he have good relationships with friends and colleagues. You bet. Does he have a home? Certainly. Would he ever call someone a ‘cockroach’. No, definitely not. He looks at people he passes on the street and wonders what their story is and what their future holds. Imagine if we all responded in the same way.
