Careless talk: how not to discuss homelessness

(Lustre Art Group / Adobe Stock)

George Orwell, in his seminal essay Politics and the English Language, drew a direct line between precision in expression, clarity of thinking and the health of the political realm. “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” Orwell wrote. “A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should know better.”

Drawing on new research, I am going to make a case for reflection on how we use language to talk about homelessness – one of our most complex social challenges.

Politicians, perhaps more than any other profession, understand the impact of language. They know a carefully chosen combination of words, or turn of phrase, can be the difference between a comment, question or speech resonating in the minds of voters or being quickly forgotten. Equally, they know how fast a poorly phrased remark can generate confusion or controversy.

As a Westminster political correspondent for 15 years, I remember the skill with which some of Parliament’s greatest recent orators used the richness and vividness of language: William Hague using humour and verve to rally his backbenchers; Robin Cook’s moral indignation as he resigned from the cabinet to oppose UK participation in the invasion of Iraq; the Rev Ian Paisley reciting scripture to rail against policy on Northern Ireland.

I recall how Vince Cable, as acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, punctured the hubris of Gordon Brown early in his premiership by describing his “remarkable transformation in the last few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean, creating chaos out of order”.

Language is central to the art of politics but is also integral to social change. Recent decades have seen great strides in policy responses to previously marginalised issues or populations, accompanied by profound and consequential changes in societal attitudes. Changes in the use of language have always been central to these.

In the mid-1980s, hundreds of people were dying from Aids-related illnesses. The link to HIV infection was poorly understood. Much of the language used by public figures and the press when referring to Aids was deeply pejorative. The former chief constable of Manchester referred to gay people – those most at risk – as “swirling around in a cesspit of their own making”. Some of Britain’s biggest selling tabloids referred to the Aids crisis as the “gay plague’”

When Norman Fowler, then health secretary, took the brave decision to make the government’s response one of public health, central to the execution of his strategy was to neutralise the language. He authorised a very high-profile information campaign that presented the facts and risks of HIV in a non-judgemental way. Many of my generation, who were university students at the time, still remember its powerful television advertisements, with an image of a tombstone and the message: “Don’t die of ignorance.”

To give a more recent example, several years ago I found myself waiting in a queue outside Buckingham Palace directly behind Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff, the former England cricket captain (he’s tall). Once inside, after assorted celebrities, journalists and others were shown to a sun-lit reception room and we were served tea in bone china cups, in strode Prince Harry. The occasion was the launch of the Heads Together campaign to encourage people to talk openly about mental ill health and ask for help, run through the Royal Foundation.

Homelessness remains beset by judgemental responses, false narratives and entrenched stereotypes

Prince Harry was at his best: fluent, passionate, relaxed. With brilliant effectiveness, the campaign neutralised the manner in which mental illness was presented and discussed, and made a lasting difference in dismantling much of its associated stigma and prompting more people to seek support.

Regrettably, some other areas of social policy have not seen comparable progress and none more so than homelessness, the most extreme form of social exclusion. Homelessness remains beset by judgemental responses, false narratives and entrenched stereotypes that present formidable barriers to addressing its root causes. Many of these are reflected in how we talk about homelessness.

As the ‘what works’ centre for homelessness, seeking to bring evidence-led solutions to the fore, we at the Centre for Homelessness Impact commissioned two leading social psychologists at King’s College London to analyse how language, and the context in which it is used, influence and shape public attitudes to homelessness. Dr Apurv Chauhan, principal lecturer in social and cultural psychology, and professor Juliet Foster, dean of education at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, used their research findings to create a simple checklist that public figures such as parliamentarians can use to avoid unconscious associations with stigma when talking about homelessness.

Stigma is the conscious or unconscious process of expressing social rejection, through labelling, stereotyping, separating from and discriminating against people different to ourselves.

Chauhan and Foster collected a corpus of 4,505 everyday sentences about homelessness, taken from social media posts, articles in British newspapers and common phrases used in the homelessness sector. These were reviewed by a panel of 50 people with direct experience of homelessness, working in pairs, who identified 943 of these sentences as stigmatising.

By analysing these, the academics found distinct categories in how people affected by homelessness are presented in the written word as different and the context in which this takes place.

The most common was associating homelessness with lower social status (25 per cent), followed by emphasising differences in appearance (18 per cent), imputing personal deficiencies (16 per cent) and claiming behaviour that deviates from social norms (16 per cent). Other categories they identified were presenting people impacted by homelessness as socially undesirable (eight per cent), linking homelessness with substance abuse and addiction (five per cent) and associating homelessness with germs and disease (one per cent).

The word ‘homelessness’ was used interchangeably with rough sleeping, which is only one form of homelessness. Members of Parliament and their staff will be well aware of the breadth of homelessness, for example from casework involving people placed in temporary accommodation, but most people are not.

Attribution of blame was common (“homelessness is a lifestyle choice”). Homelessness was often used unflatteringly as a point of comparison (“I would rather be homeless than …”) or a butt of jokes (“I need a haircut, I’m starting to look homeless”).

Using this analysis, Chauhan and Foster produced a short checklist on ways to avoid stigmatisation when referring to homelessness, which we hope may be of use to parliamentarians and their staff.

One tip is to be clear that homelessness is much broader than rough sleeping. Another is to focus on the person, not their current housing status. Instead of “the homeless” or “a homeless man”, they suggest “people experiencing homelessness”. Such terms are widely used by elected representatives in the United States and Canada.

Other advice is to reference homelessness only when relevant, not to link homelessness and substance use unless facts bear this out, and to avoid suggesting common characteristics shared by people impacted by homelessness. People are individuals.

These are small changes, based on rigorous evidence. Altering our language on homelessness may enable a change in the wider narrative, including policy change, and create the conditions for ending homelessness for good. 

Greg Hurst is communications director at the Centre for Homelessness Impact, and was political correspondent for Southern Newspapers group, 1993 to 2000, and The Times, 2000 to 2008

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