Invisible People: Approximately 20 homeless people die each day, but probably not for the reasons you’d expect. Many of these deaths are gruesome, violent, and, perhaps even more tragically, encouraged. A growing trend of criminalizing homeless people creates an unfathomably hostile environment for our neighbours without walls. In extreme cases, it is costing them their lives.
Violence against homeless people continues to increase. At times, these violent encounters, which usually begin as harassment, sexual assaults, or robberies, end in the death of the homeless person. This is the side of homelessness you rarely read about in the press. Homeless people are dying via hate crimes. They are being strangled in subway stations, stabbed in alleyways, beaten to death outside of gas stations, shot in the wee hours of the morning, and worse.
Recently, serial killers stalked the city streets in both New York City and Detroit. Their targets? People who were enduring the horrors of homelessness. In cities nationwide, there has been a rapidly rising murder rate against unhoused people.
Read full article: How criminalization is contributing to homeless deaths
