Liverpool Judge Agrees: ‘Home Is Where The Heart Is’

A Liverpool man has been sentenced to two months in jail for urinating on a homeless man while he slept rough in the city centre.

In a remarkable decision, District Judge Wendy Lloyd jailed Stephen Gibney not just for degrading the homeless man as a person, but also for attacking his home. A report in The Independent states that Justice Lloyd condemned the offence, calling it: “A deliberate act of degradation of a homeless person … it was his home, his little pitch where he was trying to establish himself as a human being … apparently, to you and your companion this was just a joke.”

By recognising that a homeless person can have something akin to a home, the judge acknowledges that home is an abstract and subjective idea – the meaning of home can differ between people and contexts. People who are homeless in the legal sense often feel as if they have a home, whether that is a city, a particular neighbourhood, a family or a friendship group. Some even understand their home in connection to the land, or as a content state of mind.

By making these comments, Justice Lloyd affords homeless people the dignity of having a recognisable defensible space, marked out by their possessions, which, in reality is their home and should be respected as such.

In Liverpool, like many cities in the UK, rough sleepers and street drinkers are often viewed as obstacles to regeneration and subjected to a range of punitive measures, such as the criminalisation of street drinking and begging, designed to clear them from view. It was all part of the bid to present the city as prosperous and cultured, and to free it of its previous reputation for poverty, crime and post-industrial decline.

Consequently, the view that rough sleepers pose a problem for prosperity and progress stem from the false belief that they perform all bodily functions – from going to the toilet, to sleep and sex – in public spaces rather than a private home. Because of this, rough sleepers are seen as uncivilised and unwelcome by authorities determined to attract business and tourism.

Once it is recognised that the idea of “home” goes beyond the conventional house of bricks and mortar, many more violations come to light: from the clearance of informal settlements, to the enforced displacement of whole populations. The phenomenon is so widespread that it has even been given a name – domicide.

By the way, the “-cide” bit means murder: the deliberate, calculated and wilful killing of a home. By thinking of the destruction of “home” as an act of killing, its meaning becomes clear – home means so much more than simply a place or a building.

Like the old saying goes: “Home is where the heart is…”