Campaigner Kerri Douglas was arrested under an archaic law that criminalised rough sleeping and begging for 200 years. Her story inspired the government to finally axe the act. Like many 13-year-old girls, campaigner Kerri Douglas used to dream about being famous. By that age, she had already spent years moving between foster homes. “I used to bunk off school and go to the West End because you used to see famous people,” she told Big Issue. “Then I went and missed the train home and joined the homeless community under Charing Cross train station.”

Her reason for this was simple: she felt safer on the streets than in her foster placements. Having experienced abuse and neglect from a young age, Douglas didn’t see sleeping rough as a sentence, but an escape.

“Back when I was a kid in the 80s, there was a programme called The Raggy Dolls, and it was basically about the reject toys that were broken,” she said. “I just think the homeless community is the same. We were the same, even though we were different.”

Today, Douglas is a campaigner who helped to overturn the Vagrancy Act, a law which criminalised rough sleeping and begging in England and Wales for more than 200 years. But during the decade that she lived on the streets, Kerri became a target of the law herself.

Read full article: How one woman’s arrest helped to scrap the Vagrancy Act and decriminalise rough sleeping