SOCIAL EXCLUSION: what is it, types, examples and proposals

The economic precariousness of people in current circumstances reaches a dimension and extension that leads those who affect not only to poverty, but also to social exclusion. Arrived at the stage of exclusion, there is still one more step: marginalization. The phenomenon cannot be reduced to the socio-economic dimension: social exclusion is a multifactorial situation that we proceed to analyze from the psychological and social intervention perspective. We will focus the analysis on those who become users of public services (specifically Libraries) in a step prior to desocialization. These users make up a faithful group but not exempt from peculiarities that may collide with the rest of users and with the institution itself, both due to difficulties with compliance with the rules of use, such as the planning and adaptation needs of the service offering librarians.

In this Psychology-Online article, we will see in depth what is social exclusion, its types and examples and proposals to help combat it.

Index

1. What is poverty
2. What is social exclusion
3. When you enter poverty
4. Types of social exclusion and poverty
5. How to combat social exclusion
6. Causes and consequences of social exclusion and discrimination
7. Stigmatization in discrimination
8. Libraries as a resource to help combat social exclusion
9. Intervention to help combat social exclusion

It is considered that poverty relates to a situation of economic inequality characterized by a level of income less than half or less than average of income received in a specific context by households or individuals (Subirats et als., 2004). And one step further, there would be social exclusion. Initially, social exclusion was associated with the state of unemployment and instability of social ties that every person has (within it, marginality).

The social exclusion it is multifactorial, we think that if it were not so, even in its most extreme facet, poverty, it would be approachable with relative ease since the affected person would not miss any opportunity that would not lead him towards a more social functioning normal; Above all, because he is the most interested in breaking out of this situation.

In many cases, social and public services constitute the final resources for a supposed social reintegration, liminal, prior or close to desocialization and destitution. Among these public services are libraries. A certain number of users, who may have known previous normalized psychic, relational, economic and social functioning; once deprived of such conditions that made their insertion possible, they collapse and lead to the indigence, being the library one of the last milestones regarding normality, or contact with said normality. Or at least, that's what we want to think, although it is illusory.

In addition, we will try to succinctly analyze the process that takes place in the library as a public space, which as Such welcomes all types of users and, on occasions, coexistence is problematic and generates friction between the people.

To speak of poverty is to relate to economic criteria about people and their homes. In Spain there is an inconsistent and varied non-contributory pension system depending on the autonomous community in which the person in question resides. However, there is a consensus that establishes that the definitive step to marginality is constituted by theloss of home.

In terms of FEANTSA (European Federation of National Organizations working with the Homeless) (2018), according to the THEOS typology there are different types of people subject to the situation of homelessness and exclusion residential:

to. Homeless (fooflees)

• 1. Living in a public space (without domicile)
• 2. Overnight in a shelter and / or forced to spend the rest of the day in a public space

b. Homeless (houseless)

• 3. Stay in service centers or shelters (hostels for the homeless that allow different models of stay)
• 4. Living in women's shelters
• 5. Living in temporary accommodation reserved for immigrants and asylum seekers
• 6. Living in institutions: prisons, health care centers, hospitals with nowhere to go, etc.)
• 7. Live in supportive accommodations (no lease)

c. Insecure housing

• 8. Living in a home without legal title (living temporarily with family or friends involuntarily, living in a home without a lease agreement - occupants are excluded, etc.)
• 9. Legal notice of home abandonment
• 10. Living under the threat of violence from the family or partner

d. Inadequate housing

• 11. Living in a temporary structure or shack
• 12. Living in unsuitable housing under state law
• 13. Living in a crowded home

The loss of home implies “a deep rupture in the person's life, their personal expectations and social structures” (Márquez et als., 2012). There are groups among which more emphasis is placed on carrying out the prevention, such as:

• Prisons
• Health centers (long-stay hospitals, psychiatric treatment centers and drug addiction care)
• Child protection centers
• Armed forces (once demobilized or upon return from combat or especially dangerous missions)
• Immigrants (Documentation and Studies Center -SIIS, 2005)

Although care resources exist, there are great differences in social and health support between the different areas in which the services are carried out. interventions with homeless people and they are comparatively lower than those of the neighboring countries (Márquez, op., cit.). They generally consist of emergency solutions that contemplate accommodation and coping with the most urgent needs (where to sleep, eat, shower and stay for certain hours). Violations of the user's needs are also frequent in terms of hygiene, privacy (bathrooms, showers, toilets, bedrooms community (with its correlate of noise, transfer of new users and coupling in free spaces)), problems related to safety personal. In return, they are required to have an attitude of reintegration, of minimal collaboration. Obviously, the most variable, unquantifiable and difficult to approach processes are those related to the personal destructuring that live the people who are in the street. Hence, existing institutional practices, in certain cases, have a high degree of failure and, one of the places from which they cannot be evicted are the existing spaces in the libraries, during the opening hours to the public.

Jonhstone et als. (2015) analyzed the relationship between discrimination and well-being (in this case, its absence), in this case in the Australian population. They identified three elements that affect the relationship between well-being and discrimination perceived and, which have a propensity to amplify the negative effects of the second on the First. In some way, they would explain why people's perceptions that they feel and see helpless may be underlying reasons for discrimination and affect the well-being they experience. Thus they indicate:

Make stigma a "controllable" factor

First, there is evidence to suggest that when the stigmatized identity is considered to be in a certain way controllable measure (such as unemployment, drug addiction or obesity), group-based discrimination has a most detrimental effect on well-being than targeted discrimination against those with uncontrollable stigma (such as race or gender). In fact, both individuals and perpetrators are more likely to perceive negative group-based treatment It is legitimate if it targets people with controllable stigmas compared to uncontrollable stigmas (Weiner et al., 1988; Rodin et al., 1989).

Because housing status is perceived as something under the control of an individual, this is why it is often homeless people are considered to beresponsible for your homelessness adequate (Parsell and Parsell, 2012) and, it is possible (with more certainty) that the homeless face highly legitimized forms of discrimination, which amplifies the negative consequences for their wellness.

Prejudices towards the homeless

Second, despite the fact that homeless people are perceived as having difficulties and in need of care and compassion (Kidd, 2004; Benbow et al., 2011; Shier et al., 2011), there is also evidence that homeless people are not perceived as fully human (Harris and Fiske, 2006). Research has shown that homeless people, as a group they are not considered competent or warm and, therefore, they form "the lowest of the lowest" (Fiske et al., 2002). This causes the worst type of prejudice (disgust and contempt) and can make people functionally equivalent to objects (Harris and Fiske, 2006). This further increases the perceived legitimacy of negative treatment of the homeless and, in turn, compromises an individual's ability to deal with discrimination.

Other stigmatized conditions

Third, homeless people are often not only discriminated against because of their housing status, but are also discriminated against for other reasons. In particular, these individuals also tend to experience mental illness and / or drug addiction, conditions that are subject to high levels of stigma in society (Barry et al., 2014).

In short, because homeless people face discrimination that is perceived to legitimize attacking them for many different reasons, we predict that the well-being of these people will suffer negatively. Accordingly, both qualitative and quantitative work describe the negative impact of discrimination against homeless people on their well-being (Phelan et al., 1997; Lynch and Stagoll, 2002; Kidd, 2007) and the homeless describe the experience of discrimination as making the transition from homelessness homelessness to employment and stable housing is significantly more complex and challenging (Milburn et al., 2006; Piat et al., 2014). When not, impossible.

We can experience it daily in our daily lives and how, unconsciously and unwantedly, we make use of Of these mechanisms of discrimination, the "normalized" group, those of us who have had the fortune to overcome adversity. Professor Declerck exposes it as much more elegant in his book The shipwrecked, when he points out the difficulty of achieving identification between the therapist and the patient and, the latter (already defeated and abandoned all hope) begins his fall and sinking (how the professional escapes, seeking to lose his identity, vanish):

"This dimension of the gaze refers to a classic theme of the discourse of society in relation to the street population: it is clean and dirty. The homeless, residues of the social body, are its disgrace and tarnish its space. Faced with this hybrid pest that conveys a compound of anguish for safety and aesthetic inconvenience, it is important to "clean up" the space, displacing the homeless to some other place socially, if not geographically, far. The mere sight of him is inopportune. It is necessary to steal them from their gaze, which is a sanitized space, it should no longer find, in fine, anything other than itself in a perspective without blemishes, that is to say, empty, that is to say, dead. 240.

The lack of sphincter control, to which Professor Declerck (op. cit.) gives a value within a psychoanalytic interpretation: he attributes to this behavior a relationship with the rupture of his corporal and spatio-temporal identity. By acting at his own discretion, the stable bodily elaboration in the subject between interiority and bodily exteriority disappears: In this way, the individual finds himself exiled from the world and from the demands of it, time, space, others and himself. same. Poetic, but tragic. And simultaneously, it is an instrument that he uses to ignore, first, and then expel those around him, while at the same time appropriates a space in its environment ("foul smell", "horrible"). He breaks the social order, he is the transgressor par excellence, along with the criminal, the drug addict, the prostitute (sometimes the roles overlap and share). Here, we enter the "normals" that, we are aggrieved (by the smell like aggression of our clean paradise), but the alleged aggressor does not understand why (already adapted and without self-perception of the smell that his body and his belongings).

But in order to "help" them out of this state, a request must be made from them. indomiciliates, with demands that they are unable to maintain over time (a concept that they have annulled in their to be and to be). The first, some kind of documentation is required, who tend to lose frequently (as a self-punishment, thus they are more concerned with their cart, their sleeping cards, than with the documentation) and reapply to be eligible for any type of assistance, but which cannot be offered because they lack such assistance. documentation. It is a tremendous effort for sick, desocialized people, who do not understand what is being asked of them, but who also have already lost it, once requested. An infernal circle, without end, of suffering for the affected and of a certain disdain on the part of the well-meaning helpers.

The libraries are one of the emergency spaces par excellence: equipped with lighting, heating, public access toilet services, possibility of interact with some users and the general public, before entering and after leaving, in the vicinity. But in addition, they are and can be, one of the last opportunities before the immersion in destitution, in the conversion of the person into “landscape and urban furniture”. Certainly, these people are a small and heterogeneous part, who demand part of the public services that the library can provide them (Fitzpatrick Ass, 2004) (and they don't even demand them, they just stay there). Such users are incompletely assimilated people, since they have lost their abilities, their social status or have left their previous culture, which is why they are rejected or fail to be fully accepted in the new society in whose bosom they live. In this perspective, commonly the subject who has lost his social status becomes part of a undifferentiated minority group with respect to the majority group, supposedly normalized (Meneses, 2008).

Based on a personal experience in the performance of an internship, therefore, with a limited value in time and the number of facilities observed -practices of the Faculty of Documentation- has allowed us to make some appraisals, which perhaps required on our part a greater methodological deepening, in two dimensions.

The users

The first refers to users, with a very simplistic distinction, distinguishing with some ease between:

• A temporarily disadvantaged user economically and socially (even passer-by, unemployed, but with attempts at reintegration).
• A Username what could we consider more diligent (of a more permanent nature), in terms of their behavior within the library and the use of its facilities.

It differentiates them within their precariousness, in the first place, their economic status - absence from work, exhaustion of benefits, in the first case, in the face of a total absence of resources and concern about getting to the soup kitchen on time and accommodation-.

Health factors

Second, we appreciate differences in their health factors:

• Generally preserved or slightly affected, in the first case.
• Faced with the existence of physical and / or mental health problems, in the second; in addition to different behavior: respect for the rules, in the diligent, compared to greater laxity in the rules of use and behavior, in the case of the most deprived.

Cultural and educational factors

Third, differences are observed in cultural and educational factors: while the disadvantaged user makes an effort, based on the resources available, to acquire, develop and maintain new skills and competencies -use of institutional, legislative, resource bulletins from social services available, ICTs, attempt to shorten the digital divide (both as a tool, as a hobby, even having a virtual fixed address, mailbox electronic).

For his part, the second, disinherited, if he resorts to the services to shelter himself, make a hobby use -when he is interested- in ICTs or, more frequently, total disinterest (occupying a place with a certain degree of comfort, in the computer or audio-visual area).

Vital circumstances

A fourth observation refers to the vital circumstances that differentiate them: employment situation, family nucleus (divorce or recent separation, conflictive guardianship of children, distance from home due to migration due to economic factors) of the user diligent; facing apathy, disconnection from the environment and available resources.

Institution attitude

A second dimension in terms of appraisals is relative to the attitude that the institution itself and the rest of the normalized users present in relation to these individuals, together with the treatment received by these people and provided by the institution, which undoubtedly affects their state of mind and physical.

Observations

Following intuition, without an observational, not quantitative methodology, we would say that "anecdotal", but that is repeated by all centers of this nature, we have seen that this group, discriminated, minority, heterogeneous that manages to pass the threshold of libraries public presents problems derived, generically, from:

• Economic factors (lack of work, lack of resources)
• Health factors (physical and behavioral and / or both)
• Educational and cultural factors (deficiencies in new skills and competences, ICTs, etc., when not openly, absolute disinterest)

In them, the so-called digital divide: they have a significant inability to make a little profit from the resources at their disposal (they use them, when allowed, as a hobby –music, movies-; not as a tool that allows them to have a fixed virtual address - either as a mailbox to receive information and not end up disconnected from the available resources or the information that may benefit -.

In addition, they reach this state due to multiple circumstantial factors of life, personal, vital (prolonged unemployment, divorces, loss of guardianship, release from prison, substance abuse, ineffective management of public aid, etc.).

This state places them in disadvantage compared to the institution and other users. They suffer discrimination due to their notorious lack of bodily hygiene and personal appearance, discrimination due to their administrative situation (not having a fixed address, or having an address of shelters). The administrations offer them help, with enough good will, but a deficit in planning actions is missed in the face of interference with what is considered normal operation of the service (protocols on how to act, on what terms - sometimes they react in an unpleasant or verbally aggressive manner -, what actions should be taken adopt). They are users with differential characteristics, which leads them to disinterest in the administration and their own staff. It is even common for spectators to be relegated to a display of small gifts (institutional marketing, contests, conferences, pens, pen-drives, etc.) that are offered to other users and for which they show a total disinterest, on their part (no longer protest).

Although the current moment is very complex, unfortunately many users will disappear (loss of habit, greater discrimination, greater uprooting), it seems necessary that the administrations and workers in this sector, supported by municipal technicians and social services, make an effort to provide the public services that these users may demand.

It is worth considering if you could not experience something related to:

• Informational and digital literacy very basic free (which would not entail additional cost)
• Management of office tools TXT, Word and internet: handling of mail, and webs (attach, download, save etc.) that serves as a digital address.
• Set standards: few and very clear and less discretion in its application.
• Do not discriminate nor depend on the shift worker.
• Provide staff training continued in the treatment that must be provided to the general public, and in specific and particular situations.
• Prepare a letter of user rights or code of good practice in user care (together with actions aimed at the prevention and safety of workers (potentially harmful objects, attitudes or ways of approaching and addressing users, distances, language bodily…).

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Social exclusion: what is it, types, examples and proposals, we recommend that you enter our category of Social psychology.

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