With the waning of the COVID pandemic, what’s happened to the United Kingdom’s famous ‘Everybody In’ treatment of the homeless? The scramble to move the unhoused under hard roofs — shelters, motels, hotels — was at best a matter of compassion for people who were very vulnerable.
In 2023, that spirit has rapidly ebbed away. Use a Google search term such as ‘homeless criminals’ and expect to scroll past endless news reports of this region or that town establishing new rules or laws to criminalize people for simply existing.
In many places it is becoming illegal for people who are homeless to sleep without shelter, to ask for assistance, to shout noisily about whatever is tickling a mentally unhealthy brain. And indeed, homeless people are just one of a variety of human nuisances who deliberately or inadvertently annoy, embarrass, or aggravate fine upstanding citizens with thin skins.
Where homeless people are concerned, arrest, fines, jail time — all the consequences of these draconian rules and laws — go to ensure that those caught up in this nonsense will never be eligible for housing again. This is a completely counterproductive result for testing the patience of fine upstanding citizens.
Call it Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB). That gives it a ring of authority. It is one approach currently being taken, and not just as a community or regional problem. In the United Kingdom, ASB is currently being pursued at a national level. UK laws are currently under consideration that not only punish the transgressions of victims such as homeless people, but indeed any individual or group who are, to put it crudely, pissing off ‘law abiding’ citizens.
So what is ASB anyway.? Like beauty, it seems to be in the eye of the beholder. For anyone looking in on this UK initiative, it can be compiled into a virtually endless list of naughty behaviour, or perhaps more realistically, behaviour which actually becomes naughty by the declaration that it is so. From this national UK amphitheatre here are two useful articles that discuss what a tangled web ASB can become when politicians sit down to describe its many (inexhaustible?) features.
From the BYLine Times: Sunak’s Anti-Social ‘Crackdown’ is an Assault on Evidence-Based Policy
And from The Conversation: What is antisocial behaviour? According to my research, no one really knows
