Research Paper on:
Defining Deviance in a Homelessness Context

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
classifications can represent significant social power, as in the case of beauty, wealth and status, or they can symbolize aspects of society that people would just as soon forget, such  as homelessness. Indeed, one can readily argue that homelessness is not merely a representation of societys mentally unstable or lazy population; rather, it is a realistic view of how  mankind has been unable - or unwilling - to care for what is termed the fringe of society. Various reasons exist for homelessness, including corporate Americas downsizing and cutbacks, as  well as a reflection of how spousal abuse has reached epidemic proportions; escaping an abusive relationship is "one of the main causes" (Morris 241) to which women attribute their  homelessness. Families with children, who represent forty percent of the growing masses of homeless people, are often the most victimized of all those having no place to call home  (Anonymous PG). However, there is a force that worsens their grim situation even more: the deviance-defining process, which serves to effectively and negatively label homelessness as a deviant component  of humanitys socially conscious society. "Consequently, the notion of deviance is best described as a process of interaction between those labelled deviants and those doing the labelling" (Pietersen 343).  There is no question that homelessness represents the most "painful form of poverty" (Chitayat PG), with the deviance-defining process illustrating the problem in  such a negative light that the public is steered toward feelings of hostility, harassment and apathy rather than pity and benevolence. In fact, the fatalistic image of homelessness so  successfully displayed by the deviance-defining process has created a sense of "compassion fatigue" (Chitayat PG), inasmuch as the problem seems so insurmountably intractable. This perpetuating criminal attitude -- that