My days were filled with danger when I was homeless. Now the abuse of rough sleepers is only getting worse | Andy O'Rourke

New research shows that violence against homeless people is surging. But if the political will was there we could end it

• Andy O’Rourke is a support worker for Crisis

There was a time when I was sleeping rough when you could get sandwiches out of a bin round the back of the local supermarket. We would climb over the wall after closing time, take them out of the skip, then pass them around. There weren’t a lot of places you could get food back then, but eventually the security guard came and told us we couldn’t be there. I was a teenager at the time, and we explained that we weren’t stealing anything, we just wanted to feed ourselves; but after that, the guards started to throw blue ink all over the sandwiches.

This didn’t deter us. We kept coming back, to fish around at the bottom of the bins for the ones the ink hadn’t reached. So they responded by replacing the ink with bleach – opening the packs first and pouring it on, so we couldn’t tell which ones had been affected. It seemed a pointless sort of cruelty to me, but that’s the reality facing people experiencing homelessness on the streets.

Andy O’Rourke is a support worker for Crisis

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/Jl7RoZU