Homelessness discrimination

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Homeless Discrimination refers to the discrimination of the homeless , which includes devaluation, marginalization and physical violence up to murder. In addition to acts by outsiders, there is also mutual discrimination against the homeless.

Milieu of violence and social nudity

A homeless man in Paris

Lionel Thelen speaks of a milieu of violence already within the homeless scene and identifies this as an essential negative stabilizing element. This radical process leads to emotional dullness and depersonalization. Thelen speaks of 'social nudity' as of “l'exil de soi”, exile from the self or “standing next to oneself”, which weakens the personality and makes it much more difficult to return to society and the work of social institutions. According to Thelen's observations in Portugal and Spain, homeless people with additional protection - a couple or simply a dog - would be treated in a hostile manner by other homeless people without such protection.

External criminalization of the homeless

As early as 1894, Anatole France spoke of legal discrimination, literally "The law in its sublime justice forbids the rich to sleep under a bridge in the same way as the poor . "

Persecution of the homeless under National Socialism

The height of homeless discrimination was reached during National Socialism . From 1933 the persecution of so-called “ work-shy ” and so-called “ anti-social ” began. In addition to Sinti , Roma and prostitutes , this stigmatization , which is characterized as heterophobia in modern research , also includes homeless people. From 1937 onwards, people who were considered “asocial” were sent to concentration camps. According to the race hygiene and population policy research center in the Reich Health Office , anti-social characteristics were supposedly inheritable, so many homeless people were forcibly sterilized .

With the “Beggar Weeks” of 1933 and the Arbeitsscheu Reich campaign in 1938, well over 10,000 people designated as “antisocial” were deported to concentration camps.

Around 10,000 homeless people were forcibly sent to concentration camps as "non-residents" during the Nazi era. Stumbling blocks in front of the accommodation for the night (Pik As) in Hamburg are reminiscent of murdered homosexual homeless people from this period .

Criminalization of the homeless in the GDR

In the GDR, dealing with "anti-sociality" or "criminal anti-social lifestyle" was regulated in Section 249 of the Criminal Code in 1968 . The reason given was that anti-sociality was a source of crime. Non-work was classified as “parasitism” and “permanent theft of national wealth”. In addition, there were a number of instructions on how to deal with “anti-social” people. People were at risk who "reflected the development laws of socialist society incompletely or not at all, [...] by strolling around, being ailing, actively disrupting the process of activity."

Education and punishment in the pursuit of behavior that did not conform to society thus represented a legal and regulatory complex in the GDR that did not and does not exist in Federal Republican law.

Criminalization and marginalization of the homeless in the Federal Republic

After the Second World War, homeless people were in fact further criminalized in the Federal Republic. A combination of welfare, discrimination and criminalization resulted from the so-called help for those at risk , which made it possible in Germany, until the law was overturned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1967, to imprison homeless people for an unlimited period simply because of their homelessness. Detention on this basis has not been possible since then, but homeless people are still being evicted from inner city areas and public buildings, including with the help of legal gimmicks such as displaying the collection of returnable bottles .

Criminalization of the homeless in the US

The joint report A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in US Cities by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty found an increasing criminalization of homeless people in the cities of the United States in 2006. It was gathered here that increasing numbers of homeless people were being criminalized for sleeping, eating, sitting and begging in public, and that “loitering” was being sanctioned by law enforcement officers .

Criminalization of the homeless in Hungary

In Hungary, the criminalization of the homeless was enshrined in the constitution in September 2013.

Homeless devaluation

In Germany, the devaluation of the homeless is measured annually with the research project group- related enmity. Devaluation of the homeless means here the "hostility towards those people who do not correspond to the ideas of a regulated bourgeois existence."

On the subject of devaluing the homeless, 38.8% of those questioned said in 2007 that they found homeless people uncomfortable in cities (2005: 38.9%). 32.9% agreed with the statement that the homeless are work-shy (2005: 22.8%). The demand that begging homeless people should be removed from the pedestrian zones was supported by 34% of those questioned (2005: 35%). Overall, the devaluation of the homeless has increased compared to 2005.

Wilhelm Heitmeyer suspects that the increasing devaluation of the homeless is connected with a shift in the market economy to a market society and with it an economization of the social, which as a result people are viewed more according to the criterion of usefulness, which in turn contributes to the devaluation of the homeless perceived as "useless" :

In addition to the long-term unemployed, other groups that make little or no contribution to increasing the efficiency of market society can fall victim to economic evaluation criteria. The latter applies in particular to those people who are still below the long-term unemployed in the social hierarchy and whose work ethic is estimated to be even lower: the homeless.

Violence against the homeless

Violence Against People Perceived as Homeless in the United States
Year / degree of violence 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
Deadly violence 48 42 17th 15th 9 25th 13 20th
Non-lethal violence 12 21st 35 21st 61 80 73 122
(National Coalition for the Homeless: Hate, Violence, and Death on Main Street USA: A Report on Hate Crimes and Violence Against People Experiencing Homelessness 2006 [1] )

The media reported several times on violence against the homeless. There are no official statistics on violence against the homeless in the Federal Republic of Germany. An evaluation of the reported crimes shows that the perpetrators are often small groups of young people with a right-wing extremist background. In 2001 this was the reason for an inquiry from the then PDS to the German federal government. Due to public criticism, attacks against the homeless have been officially classified as politically motivated crime and hate crime since 2001 . Many homeless people were killed by right-wing extremist violence in the Federal Republic of Germany . In the United States, according to the February 2007 National Coalition for the Homeless , reported violence ( hate crime ) against the homeless has increased dramatically. It is noticeable that the perpetrators are often teenagers or young adults who cite boredom as the reason for their criminal behavior.

The American criminologist and hate crime expert Brian Levin of California State University, San Bernardino stated that the homeless homeless murders attributable to hate crime were in no way different from other hate crime murders, except that it was very much give more. One report said that between 1999 and 2005, 82 people were murdered in the United States because of their "race," ethnicity, or religious or sexual orientation. These figures date back to the FBI, the statistics on so-called "hate crimes" (since 1990 Hate Crime leads). The National Coalition for the Homeless stated that 169 homeless people were murdered during the same period.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Thelen, Lionel (2006), L'exil de soi. Sans-abri d'ici et d'ailleurs, Bruxelles, Publications des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis.
  2. ^ France, Anatole (1894). "VII", "Le lys rouge": "  Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts  ".
  3. ↑ Detlef Baum: The city in social work - A manual for social and planning professions , 2007, pages 164 and 165
  4. ↑ Ulrich Sondermann-Becker: “Arbeitsscheue Volksgenossen” - Evangelical wandering welfare in the “Third Reich” in Westphalia - a case study , Bielefeld, 1995, page 55
  5. ↑ Homeless people persecuted during the Nazi era. In: Hamburger Abendblatt of August 16, 2008, p. 16 about the exhibition "Homeless people under National Socialism"
  6. ↑ § 249 StGB of the GDR of January 12, 1968, also in the new version of December 4, 1988 (Journal of Laws of 1989 No. 3, p. 33) read: Paragraph I: Who the social coexistence of citizens or public order and Impaired security by avoiding regular work out of work shyness, even though he is fit for work, is punished with a suspended sentence, a prison sentence or a prison sentence of up to two years. Paragraph II: Anyone who engages in prostitution or in any other way interferes with public order and security through an anti-social way of life will also be punished.
  7. ↑ Erich Buchholz: Criminal Law, in: Uwe-Jens Heuer: The legal order of the GDR - Claim and Reality, Baden-Baden, 1995, page 316
  8. ^ Matthias Zeng, State Commissioner of the Free State of Thuringia for the records of the State Security Service of the former GDR: "Asocial" in the GDR: Transformations of a moral category, page 35
  9. ↑ News from Freiburg from October 28 , 2016 : 104 references for the homeless in the city center Badische Zeitung / Fudder.de, accessed on December 11, 2016
  10. ↑ This is how the cities drive the poor out of the city of Stern.de from January 31, 2015, accessed on December 11, 2016
  11. ↑ The National Coalition for the Homeless and The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty: A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in US Cities , January 2006 ( PDF )
  12. ^ The National Coalition for the Homeless and The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty: A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in US Cities, January 2006, pp. 79 ff.
  13. ^ Elisabeth Katalin Grabow, When hopelessness is punishable. One comment , pusztaranger.wordpress.com , October 2, 2013.
  14. ^ Controversial law. Hungary cracks down on the homeless , Süddeutsche Zeitung , October 1, 2013.
  15. ^ Wilhelm Heitmeyer / Jürgen Mansel 2008: Social development and group-related misanthropy: Unclear perspectives , in: German states vol. 6, p. 19
  16. ↑ ibid .: p. 28
  17. ^ Wilhelm Heitmeyer / Kirsten Endrikat: The economization of the social. Consequences for “superfluous” and “useless” , in: German states vol. 6, p. 68
  18. ↑ Young people film their violence against the homeless. (No longer available online.) Cologne police press portal, January 8, 2008, archived from the original on March 15, 2008 ; Retrieved March 5, 2008 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.presseportal.de
  19. ↑ Christian Linde: “Homeless people” as victims of structural, direct and fourth violence , in: Berlin Forum Violence Prevention No. 16 ( PDF ( Memento of the original from January 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. ) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.berlin.de
  20. ↑ Right-wing extremist-motivated homicides against homeless people and their registration - Minor question from the MP Ulla Jelpke and the parliamentary group of the PDS. (PDF; 114 kB) In: Drucksache 14/6870. September 4, 2001, accessed February 16, 2008 .
  21. ↑ Periodic Safety Report of the BMI 2006, p. 138; download of chapter 3.2  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Note, the source reference  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this note. There on p. 134 is wrong: Not p. 210, but point 2.10 on p. 263)@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.bmi.bund.de  @1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.bmj.bund.de  
  22. ↑ National Coalition for the Homeless: Hate, Violence, and Death on Main Street USA: A Report on Hate Crimes and Violence Against People Experiencing Homelessness 2006 Archived copy ( Memento of the original from April 3, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nationalhomeless.org
  23. ↑ Attacks on homeless soaring. Todd Lewan, AP, April 8, 2007, accessed March 5, 2008 .