Grieving home

Abstract

Drawing on the growing areas of research on emotional embodiment, this paper develops an understanding of the spatiality of grief as central to the discussion of young people's experiences of homelessness. In the context of my engagement with young homeless people in inner-city Sydney, I explore grief as central in shaping young people's everyday body–place relations. I argue that grief over often brutal past homes continues to haunt young people and impact on the ways in which they relate to place, including the place of their own body. I explore young people's displacement and grief-stricken forms of inhabitation as well and their discovery of ‘therapeutic’ places which allow the re-formation of more positive relations to place and self. I argue that while it is understood that grief and trauma are key causes of homelessness amongst young people, grief is rarely explored as an embodied practice, or as a key factor which continues to underpin trajectories of homelessness after initial exits from home.

Keywords:

• young homeless people
• grief
• embodiment
• displacement
• therapeutic place

Notes

1 Once out of the housing market, and having exhausted ‘couch-surfing’ networks amongst friends and extended family, young people would perhaps spend some time sleeping rough or in squats before eventually making their way to one of the few youth-specific crisis refuges in Sydney, such as the ones I worked in. Staffed twenty-four hours and based in the inner city, youth refuges usually accommodate young people aged 16 to around 20. The facilities (in existence in most Australian capital cities or central urban areas) are run by non-government organizations mostly with government funding from the National Supported Accommodation Assistance Program. The services essentially aim to stabilize young people with the aim to reconnect them with family or place them in longer-term accommodation with education and employment programmes attached.

2 Votta and Manion (2003) and Ayerst (1999) similarly note the prevalence of self-harm as a coping mechanism amongst homeless young people.