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Street homelessness policies often provoke great intensity of feeling, especially when they include elements of force. This paper considers the moral case stakeholders present for and against enforcement in street homelessness policies via a series of philosophically informed normative 'lenses', including paternalist, utilitarian, rights-based, contractualist, mutualist and social justice perspectives. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research in six UK cities, it highlights the disparity between the condemnatory portrayals of enforcement dominant in academic and media discourses, and the more complex and/or ambivalent views held by practitioners and homeless people 'on the ground'. It concludes that an analytical framework that pays systematic attention to this span of normative lenses can facilitate more constructive, even if still 'difficult', conversations about policy interventions in this exceptionally sensitive area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates pathways into multiple exclusion homelessness (MEH) in the UK and, informed by a critical realist theoretical framework, explores the potential causal processes underlying these pathways. Drawing on an innovative multistage quantitative survey, it identifies five experiential clusters within the MEH population, based on the extent and complexity of experiences of homelessness, substance misuse, institutional care, street culture activities and adverse life events. It demonstrates that the most complex forms of MEH are associated with childhood trauma. It also reveals that the temporal sequencing of MEH-relevant experiences is remarkably consistent, with substance misuse and mental health problems tending to occur early in individual pathways, and homelessness and a range of adverse life events typically occurring later. The strong inference is that these later-occurring events are largely consequences rather than originating causes of MEH, which has important implications for the conceptualisation of, and policy responses to, deep exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines recent responses to 'problematic street culture' in England, where increasing pressure has been exerted to prevent people from begging and street drinking in public spaces, with rough sleeping also targeted in some areas. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with enforcement agents, support providers and targeted individuals, it assesses the extent to which the strategies employed are indicative of a 'revanchist expulsion' of the deviant Other and/or an expression of 'coercive care' for the vulnerable Other. It concludes that, whilst the recent developments appear, at first glance, to be symptomatic of revanchist sanitisation of public space, closer examination reveals that the situation is actually much more complex than a revanchist reading of the situation might suggest, and perhaps not as devoid of compassion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]