In the last decade, since a data collection system has been set up for the Help Centres for homeless people in Italian railway stations, it has become evident that the majority of users are non-Italian citizens.
For those who are not familiar with Help Centres, they are places where homeless and deprived people can go to be assisted and guided to social services available in the city. They are not shelters, nor drop-in centres: in fact, they were conceived to provide assistance and guidance to find effective answers outside the stations. The 16 Help Centres now open are based on the cooperation between Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, providing the space in the station area for free (over 11,000 square meters altogether), a third sector organisation, providing the service, and local authorities, providing financial, or institutional support. The Help Centres form a network called ONDS (National Observatory on Solidarity in railway stations), supported by Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, the National Association of Italian Cities and the Social Cooperative Europe Consulting Onlus, in charge of the operations. Europe Consulting Onlus manages the data collection system and developed the 2012 Sodalitas Social Award Winner IT Platform Anthology, used to register all the social intervention and therefore to measure statistically, analyse and study the issues related to poverty, which have an impact on railway stations.
Recent front-page news witnessed once again how stations are vulnerable to major social phenomena, such as immigration, when temporary suspensions of the Schengen Treaty block thousands of immigrants on their way to Northern EU Countries in Italian railway areas.
Besides registered users, a large number of refugees found assistance in railway stations, namely from East Africa and Syria. Debarked in Sicily or in the ports of the other Southern regions, especially Bari and Reggio Calabria, these new users cross the entire country, stopping in this or that city, depending on their itinerary and on what each place can offer them on their way to Northern Europe.
In Milan, for example, 87.000 people, Syrians and Eritreans for the most part, have found shelter in the Centrale station since 2013. In this very case, Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane has set up, with the Help Center and the City of Milan, a special plan to ease the assistance to those who could not be sheltered elsewhere, granting access to the station facilities, identifying and securing specific waiting areas, with the support of NGOs. In addition to that, the railway company refurbished a space of 1.500 square meters and offered it to the Municipality, with the aim of granting a better shelter which is not in the station.
A similar action was held last June in Rome, at the Tiburtina station, to shelter Somali and Eritrean refugees, prevented from moving north for the closing of Austrian borders. An emergency camp was set up in a parking area by the station, in accordance with the City of Rome and the Red Cross, and an entire building has been put at the Municipality’s disposal for sheltering migrants.
Such dedicated actions are necessary to face immigration waves, as the tools that the Help Centres have been building for years to support homeless people out of poverty, and which represent our model of social intervention in the stations, can hardly respond to their needs. Migrants are just incidentally homeless, for they are in transit towards a better future, with such a strong hope to succeed, that we hardly find in our typical users. Our classic approach, based on building a relationship with the user, seems to be unfit for this transient population, due to the simple fact that in less than a week they will be gone.
Migrants come to us with basic needs: to eat, to take a shower, to sleep, although sleeping in a shelter can raise in them the fear to be identified, which would mark, following Dublin, the end of their trip to other countries than Italy. Therefore it is very difficult, if not impossible, to ask, to know, to understand who these people are, what is their age or origin, to build up together an exit strategy from their present condition.
Most of the times they prefer not to tell too much about themselves. Moreover, for the sake of our Observatory, it is quite impossible to register this information in Anthology for more accurate statistics, because Help Center operators have little or no time for back-office work, busy as they are responding to tens or hundreds of people knocking at their door.
Help Centres are thus in the process of enlarging their range of services and activities. The railway company and the local authorities, from their side, are strengthening their cooperation to find new areas for sheltering, but also to assure that stations and trains continue their regular activity without major inconvenience for citizens and passengers, in the full respect of everybody’s rights.
This leads us to a critical element we gather from the Help Centres: the growing tension between users themselves, and users and citizens. In spite of numerous acts of solidarity, for example food and clothes donations, we must report an increasing intolerance towards homeless, namely migrants.
Citizens are still confronted with the aftermath of the economic and political crisis, and masses of people in distress question everyone on possible solutions and on the need for an extra effort in solidarity. Their patience is at stake, and some just can’t but blame the victims for the guilt. Let alone the recent terrorist attacks, constantly linked to immigration in medias, and unfortunately in the political debate at EU level.
In addition to that, we observe friction among the “typical” homeless and these new social services beneficiaries; the former feeling somehow deprived of their Help Centre, their operators, their resources.
Many consider the emergency measures for migrants illegitimate privileges, subtracting money to long time homeless people. Mass media report daily of Italian homeless people sleeping on benchs, while refugees are comfortably hosted in hotels, at citizens’ expense.
“Neither type of tension must be undervalued,” says Alessandro Radicchi, ONDS director. “They can worsen and destabilise the services. Moreover, they risk undermining the citizens’ support to social interventions, an expression of the responsibility that Public Administrations have on the political level, but that belongs to the society as an ethical duty”.
Needless to say that many other EU countries are confronted with the same issues. Within “Gare Européenne et Solidarité”, the network of national railway companies involved in social interventions in the stations, immigration is now a primary topic. “Immigration impact on our stations and trains is dramatic, says the co-president Fabrizio Torella (Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane), especially in transboundary areas. We are trying to set up a common strategy to be prepared to face the consequences of a phenomenon which is clearly far from lessening in the years to come”.
Homeless in Europe
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