I want to talk candidly about how I became involved in the men’s issues movement and the issues that I think matter.
Homelessness was the first big issue for me, way before I’d even heard of men’s issues themselves. Let me give you a bit of a backstory.
When I was younger, and by that I’m probably talking about from the age of 10, I would sometimes go off and “run away”. I only lived a couple of miles away from Manchester city centre and when I felt stressed I’d walk from my home to the old sunken Victorian Piccadilly gardens, putting the world to rights in my head as I walked.
I’d sit on the old wooden benches for a bit and imagine that I was going to sleep out there for the night but by the time I’d walked, whatever it was that was bugging me at the times never seemed to be that much of an issue and I’d get cold and go back home feeling better.
My family would be completely oblivious. This was the early 90s. Kids played out all day and only came back when it was time for tea or when it got dark. There were no mobile phones, every kid knew how to reverse charges from a phone box in case of emergencies or carried 10p just in case. Those were good days to be a kid!
I always had this sense of how easy it would be to become homeless and it was an issue I cared about a lot.
When I was 16 and went to college, I’d pass a homeless guy as I walked through Bury, a small town north of Manchester where I went to college. It got very cold in the winter and sometimes I’d go into the bakers and use my lunch money to buy a soup and a pasty for him.
He wasn’t begging. To be honest he just looked completely broken and like he’d given up. I’d just put the food on the floor next to him and walk off, wouldn’t even speak to him.
I used to feel very guilty that he was on the streets and I had a nice warm, safe home and I felt like I didn’t deserve the chances I had and he deserved better.
At college I participated in the college magazine and I wanted to write an article about homelessness so I decided to go into town and go speak to one of the rough sleepers I saw. I probably walked past 5 or 6 guys sleeping rough before I plucked up the courage to introduce myself to a homeless lady called Sam.
Why did I walk past all those men and talk to the first lady I saw? Part of it was a fear thing, they could have been violent or a druggie. I felt safer talking to a woman and somehow even though I cared about homelessness in general, I still had a bit more empathy for a homeless lady than a homeless man.
When I first approached her she looked so glum and wasn’t really that interested in interacting with me but after I sat down and started talking to her I think it genuinely meant a lot to her just to have another person to talk to who wasn’t looking down on her as some kind of vermin.
After the interview I gave her £20 for her time and for several years after that first meeting if I was in town and she saw me she’d call out to me. Sometimes I’d give her cash if I had any spare but she was just as interested in having a chat as anything else.
I’m ashamed to say that sometimes when I was with friends I’d try to avoid her and pretend I hadn’t seen her or go the other way. I’m not perfect, please don’t think i’m some kind of virtuous saint because I’m not, I’m flawed like everyone else.
Years later when I worked in town and we had work nights out, sometimes when I was very drunk at the end of the night I’d go sit down with some random homeless person on Piccadilly approach. Again, I’d walk past several men to sit next to a woman and just have a chat with them and offer them some food or change.
As human beings we like to feel that we are fully in control of our lives and that things like that could never happen to us. Homeless people are often dismissed as druggies and alcoholics and a blight on society.
I’ll be honest, if I was sleeping rough on the streets, getting moved on my police, fearing for my safety from some drunk lout that thinks it’s funny to try to set you on fire or beat you up, the risk of hypothermia , I’d probably turn to drugs too! Anything to numb the pain of an anonymous existence in a world that doesn’t care.
It only takes a redundancy or a break up or a mental health crisis and anyone could very easily end up on the streets.
This isn’t just a men’s issue, it’s a societal problem. The majority of rough sleepers are men but there are women too and yes, maybe people have addictions, maybe they’ve made some bad choices or committed crimes but they’re still human beings.
Many of them have mental health issues just like me, many have been through abuse or suffer from PTSD, our armed forces are particularly adept at putting people through great trauma then spitting them out with little help to deal with civilian life.
Many have poor educational attainment, can’t read or write or suffer from dyslexia or autism. It’s a complex problem.
When I see politicians talk about ending homelessness, as much as I want more shelters and services for these people, I do think that it’s a soundbite for the sake of popularity. Unless you can deal with all the complex underlying issues that can lead people into this situation then you’re never going to eradicate the problem.
The cost of housing and the lack of availability is pushing more people than ever before into homelessness. Even if they’re not sleeping rough on the streets, they’re sofa surfing or in hostels or in over-crowded unsuitable accommodation.
I don’t think we can end homelessness but we can make it better. We need more social workers, we need more mental health professionals and we need genuine affordable housing. We need to keep talking about it and telling the stories of the men and women behind the statistics. I will always be passionate about this issue.
Many of the other issues I talk about, like how male victims of domestic violence aren’t treated seriously, mental health, parental alienation, sexual assault, educational attainment deficits lead onto homelessness. You can’t tackle the issue without also taking on these other problems.
Yes, we absolutely must support women and girls, it does not need to be an either or thing. A lot of my frustration with the feminist lobby and the power it has is that it comes at the expense of men’s issues.
Really I don’t want to be a men’s advocate, I want to be a human advocate because none of us live in a vacuum, all our lives are interconnected, we are a social species.
I don’t think that acknowledging sex differences and the different experiences of men and women is a bad thing. I do think we need services that address specific needs or at least that are provided in different ways to suit the individual regardless of what genitals they happen to have.
When I bring up men’s issues often the reaction is as if I’ve said women don’t have problems or that I want to remove women’s rights and I really don’t. We may disagree on what things should or should not be a right and we may have different ideas on how to tackle these problems but can we please stop turning this into a competition because it’s a race to the bottom and “when one sex loses, we all lose” (quote Warren Farrell).
Rant Over 