Homelessness is a serious social problem, which experts define in different ways. What all definitions have in common is the fact that homelessness goes beyond the aspect of not having a place to live, as it means exclusion in all areas of life. There are many different types of homelessness, roughly divided into four groups: those without a roof, those without housing, those with an insecure housing situation and those with a substandard housing situation. Since we don't have a central institution that deals with homelessness, it's impossible to measure and record it, which makes it difficult to compare between countries. According to estimates from 2017, Slovenia had just under 3000 homeless people. The emergence of homelessness can be blamed on multiple factors, divided into structural, institutional, relational and individual. In my work, I focus mainly on relational and individual factors, as I investigate the incidence of stressful childhood experiences (ACEs) among homeless people. This is a term that originated in a study in 1998, when the first research of the sort was conducted in the United States, but has since spread widely around the world. These studies measure the presence of 10 types of experiences that individuals experience during childhood, which have a significant impact on them throughout their whole lives. The survey done in Slovenia researched the following experiences – emotional and physical violence, emotional and physical neglect, sexual abuse or violence, abandonment by one of the parents, domestic violence between the adults in the household, living with an adult who suffers from mental health problems and living with an incarcerated adult or an adult that has committed a serious crime. Different studies define the basic adverse experiences in different ways, but for the most part, they are quite similar. People who undergo more of these experiences during childhood are more likely to develop depression, addictions, and some chronic health problems, and perform poorer at school and work than those who do not. In Slovenia, a survey on the presence of ACEs found that people most often experience emotional violence, physical violence and the loss of a biological parent. Families with lower socio-economic status are at higher risk of burdensome experiences, and on average more burdensome experiences are expected to be experienced by women, people with lower educational attainment and people whose parents had lower educational attainment. The negative effects that these experiences leave on the individual can be mainly reduced by positive experiences in childhood (positive experiences in family relationships have the biggest impact) and the psychological resilience of the individual. According to some studies, the prevalence of stressful childhood experiences is higher among the homeless population, compared to the general population, as they reportedly mainly experience physical abuse, physical neglect and general dysfunction in the household in which they grew up. The goal of the research I conducted was to find out what the presence of stressful childhood experiences is among homeless people according to professionals working with this population, how they think these experiences affect an individual’s life in adulthood, and what the factors they see as most common in the onset of homelessness are. My research was quantitative, the sample included 45 units. I used an online questionnaire that I created in the Arnes 1ka website. The research has led me to some findings that could serve primarily as an initiative for further research on this topic. Professionals cited housing problems, alcohol and drug addiction, institutionalization and poverty as the most common factors influencing the emergence of homelessness. It is widely regarded that the experiences a person undergoes in their childhood have a major impact on their later life course and on the problems they face in adulthood because we form ourselves in childhood and often copy the behaviours we observe in our parents. Experts believe that most common adverse childhood experiences homeless people experience are emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical abuse, and addiction from an adult household member, while sexual abuse and mental health problems among adults in the household are the least common.
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