by Taruna Hariparsad
Since moving to Cape Town in 2016, one aspect that has stuck out for me is the city’s relationship with homeless people, sometimes referred to as “street people” or “vagrants”. As a small and increasingly dense city, in Cape Town, you are confronted with homelessness in a way I have not experienced in any other city in the country. It is quite often, literally, on your doorstep.
During my short stint in parliament, I met a homeless woman whose memory has stayed with me. She lived in a short street sandwiched between a church and its offices. She had a dog- a white and tan scruffy bundle of friendliness. As I was walking home one day, her dog came running up to me for a pat, much to my joy. We then struck up a conversation and she told me about her dog and life.
This became a daily routine, every afternoon on my way home, I would get a fluffy greeting and a short conversation with the woman. She would sometimes ask for items, like fabric whitener, as she needed to clean her clothes for choir practice. She lived in a tent on the pavement, with a few other women on the same street. Through these interactions, I began to see the routine, social structure and community she had built and developed.
Even though homeless and street people networks and communities seem to exist in a parallel universe to that of the rest of the city, the failure to recognise these, is in my opinion, a major issue. The constant relocation and displacement of homeless people have negative consequences which disproportionately impact women. According to the World Health Organisation, displacement as a result of conflict or natural disaster has led to increased violence against women and children from both enemy and “friendly sources”.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown has had many negative impacts and has highlighted how once again, women are disproportionately and uniquely impacted. During the early days of the lockdown, it was reported that cases of gender-based violence had increased not only in South Africa but the rest of the world. Homeless women were no exception to this, as we saw with the socially dysfunctional setup of the Strandfontein isolation site, where a young woman was raped.
Policy guidance needs to be updated, and a street people policy and strategy review are desperately needed. The City of Cape Town recognises this and has recently announced that its policy and strategy suite will be reviewed, and we can hope that this will bring a more holistic approach to dealing with homelessness in Cape Town.
While the Social Development Strategy (SDS) importantly identifies street people as a particularly “vulnerable group that requires assistance to achieve reintegration into communities and access to employment opportunities”, operationally, the response has been a heavy-handed law enforcement approach, to clear up and clear out street people at the request of “concerned” residents from suburbs and public spaces.
The issue here is that the Displaced People’s Unit sits within the Safety and Security Directorate, under law enforcement, which is already stretched in terms of capacity. This means that homelessness is viewed predominantly from a law enforcement perspective, rather than a social development or humanitarian perspective, which only exacerbates the issue. This aspect needs to shift towards a more balanced approach, and more social workers need to be deployed when trying to deal with homeless people, particularly when trying to remove them from an area.
The strategy of contacting family members as a first resort may also be problematic and does not take into account that a number of women who are homeless are fleeing abusive situations. More needs to be done to establish the root causes of homelessness- and this is understandably a complex task, but if we hope to establish a lasting solution, this is vital.
Finally, we as residents of Cape Town need to be more involved in a positive way, to see that homeless people are a part of our community and do not exist in a parallel universe.
