Who's the victim?

I keep on hearing calls for courts to be more focused on the victims of crime, and I agree completely - they shouldn't cause these victims even more suffering.

But who's the victim? I've come across a couple of cases recently that have put this question into perspective.

Firstly two people with severe learning disabilities and a high level of support have been having problems in their shared tenancy for quite a few months. Some plans to address the problem by moving one of them were dropped a while ago. Now one of them has attacked the other and all sorts of emergency procedures are being invoked. I'm not so interested in the details of the case, only that one of the two is currently in the classical position of the victim (of an assault), while the other therefore becomes a perpetrator.

Secondly a person I know with a high level of support needs, but not quite enough of the right kinds of problems to enable him to access certain key services immediately. As time goes on he is increasingly presenting with additional problems, and there are 'rumours' that these include a return to some of the violence that he has been involved in in the past. Violence again implies a perpetrator and a victim.

It's clear that the perpetrators of violence in both these cases are also victims. Like all the stories I'm trying to tell I don't think there's anything particularly unusual or newsworthy about these situations - similar things happen to hundreds or even thousands of people in the UK each week. I don't want to start accusing statutory services of neglect, because again I think this is in a way a violent approach to solving the problem, which often results in violent defensiveness and doesn't get anywhere.

What I would like to think about is that if we are to take a more person-centred approach to working with people in general, then we also need to take a person-centred approach to people who are violent towards others and to all the people who are victims of this violence. At the same time I think there are some natural developments towards taking a more holistic approach to our understanding and responses to violence.

Some examples of this would be:

• protecting people who suffer from, say domestic violence or sexual crimes from the added violence that can come in the investigative and judicial processes that current legal systems still tend to impose (there are already many initiatives that address these issues, and they are linked to this agenda in diverse ways);
• recognising that people who behave in violent ways are usually victims of violence and abuse themselves, that they may suffer from the multiple effects of poverty, or that they may well have low level mental health problems for example that would be amenable to community based approaches to support and rehabilitation (all sorts of people are doing this);
• questioning the value of punitive approaches including imprisoning people or stigmatising them with criminal convictions and making it harder for them to find work or access other services;
• supporting more informal preventative and community-based approaches to avoid reaching crisis situations, including recognising some of the violence still inherent in our education system and incorporating a more ethical and community based approach to teaching and education from an early age (see the Steiner schools for one approach to this);
• recognising that violence means restricting action, that sometimes violence is necessary, but we should be able to see it for what it is, discuss it properly and act on our conclusions, including a recognition that bureaucratic processes are inherently violent and that while they are necessary in some ways we need to recognise this violence and develop more effective ways of dealing with it;
• the list goes on...
  

Refugee week events

The first event in Wakefield for this year's Refugee Week has just finished, and I ate and danced and helped clear up and still I'm home at a reasonable hour to blog, which is an added bonus.

It was the Iranian Cultural Celebration tonight, and there were a couple of live performances as well as DJs and lots of delicious food. First up on violin was a former member of the Iranian Philharmonic Orchestra (from the time of the Shah). There was a bit of a band going on here, but I sadly missed most of it as I ended up working the door. Later a different man with the same name played a saz I think (see pictures here) which is very similar to an instrument an old Turkish friend of mine used to play which he called a 'ballamer' (phonetically, approximately). In and around these performances the DJs kept the party dancing.

Later in the week we have a 'refugee day' event hosted by the local MP on Friday (invitation only) and an African Night in Wakefield Cathedral on Friday evening (free, just turn up). Then on Saturday, 6-10pm, there is a Kurdish Cultural Celebration in Lightwaves Leisure Centre again (ticket required, call RASA on 01924 368855).

Someone said to me that these events weren't very cohesive or didn't seem to promote integration: Iranian, African and Kurdish events on different nights...

I think there are two responses to this. First I can't help but remember the joint Eid/Xmas party I organised in 2003. This tried hard to combine all the cultures in Wakefield, and we had Iranian and Kurdish DJs, people came from many different countries including quite a few from Albania/Kosovo, and from different parts of Africa. As the finale we had a proper 5 piece African salsa band (afficionados may know that salsa originated in Africa - like 'all' music - and was transported to South America on the slave ships...). Anyway this band started playing, and 5 minutes later 146 people had left the room - and there were only 150 to start with. Even the African people, faced with this mass exodus, got up and walked out too.

Now I've personally always taken the approach that if some people are willing to go to the effort to perform for me, then I'll at least give them the courtesy of listening and then applauding their efforts (if not necessarily their musicianship or their taste). I learnt that night not to expect such polite conventions from refugee audiences.

There is in fact a whole article, to be carefully written, about racism and discrimination and refugees. Of course I know that there have been bitter conflicts in many parts of the world where refugees come from, and the memories of these conflicts and the deep seated prejudices that come with them are difficult to forget. They have also not had the advantages of the strenuous and focused anti-discrimination campaigns we have learnt from in the West over the last century (starting from women's suffrage, and moving through the American civil rights movement, etc). And finally, refugees tend not to discriminate against English people in my experience, but people with darker skin than them for example are more likely to lose out (along with their traditional enemies) in a movement that we can see being replicated around the world again and again.

I don't want to make any sweeping generalisations here, but I always half expected refugees who had fought for freedom and justice for people in their own societies to still be standing up for freedom and justice in their new lives in the UK, and I've usually been disappointed (although I love working with them anyway, and they're no more intolerant than many English people, just in different ways).

So all sorts of clarifying statements are rushing into my head, and I know what I've just written could be contentious, but with all that in mind I'd like to move swiftly on to the second response to the lack of cohesion/integration suggestion.

These people are living in the UK every day. Sure there are positive steps we can make towards integration, and we're taking them on many of these days: finding work, getting on ok at school, bringing our children up well, etc. All this needs integration. This is happening every day.

So why can't we, one or two days a year, have a day to celebrate native cultures? In fact I think it's imperative to do this: refugees need to do it for their mental health, to help them maintain their sense of identity and history, and to help their children understand their origins; and the rest of the population need occasional days like this to add a bit of colour and spice to their lives and relieve the exhausting boredom.

And who are we to say that these different cultural traditions should be celebrated within the confines of a single event, or that refugee week events should be concentrated on being more cohesive and on delivering the Government's integration agenda? In fact there were quite a few English people there tonight, quite a few Kurdish people, a chinese woman, and an African man (with a work permit of all things :-) ). There was integration here as well as cultural stimulation and mental tonics.

I'm looking forward to the next event - but you have to have an invitation to attend, so how integrational will that be...?

Friends in high places...

...that's the side of a hill in Glasgow anyway (or the local department store).

Anyway Cartside is an interesting blog from a woman who works with refugees and languages and victims of human rights abuses. I particularly liked her descrption of the problems of getting funding, and I hope she finds a good resolution.

She linked to this blog a couple of weeks back in a post about refugee blogs, and I hope if she sees this that she'll find my thoughts on interpreters interesting.

Something to read for anyone who thinks the notes on resolving the police issues are too long...

Police issues resolved

I had a positive meeting with representatives of the Police on Friday, together with key members of the Advocacy Action Committee. This stems from a post I wrote on this blog on 14 April which was removed shortly thereafter and replaced with this note.

Amongst other things this note says that the Police were threatening legal action, and it is now necessary to provide some clarification and closure to this issue. It was my intention to republish the post at this point as the information it contained is still valid (see below for how). For a variety of reasons however I have decided to just write a summary of events.

Four days after I started this blog I received an email about a young Kurdish man who came to a youth group in some distress saying he'd just spent the night in a police cell, he didn't know why, and he thought the officers had been racist. This was a reply from a colleague to a request I'd sent out for things to write about. I published the email with some identifying information removed and some background information to put in in context, then I emailed various key people working for the Police, the Asylum Team, the Community Cohesion Advisory Group of the local strategic partnership, and others. On the first working day I received two emails from a police officer which I published in a comment to the original post, with some disparaging remarks about their investigation.

On 20 April, two days later, a senior police officer contacted one of the Advocacy Action committee members and said they were very unhappy with the allegations contained in the post, and in particular with the fact that I'd named an individual officer. They additionally felt that the blog could be a risk to community safety, and requested for it to be removed and for an apology. This was done immediately, together with a number of other changes to clarify that the blog was my personal work and was not a project of Advocacy Action's.

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I just want to make some remarks at this point on the four areas of continuing relevance, community safety, complaints, and finally racism.

Continuing relevance
The Police have investigated the original story, and they are convinced that the allegations were unfounded. They can't find any evidence of an arrest or custody, and in fact the cells in the Police Station we identified were taken out of service years ago. There were also other discrepancies in the story, although it is true that the man's door was broken down in the course of an unconnected investigation.

I still have a different perspective on this issue, as do the other people who have spoken to the Kurdish man (he hasn't wanted to speak to the Police). I won't go into the objective details (see my post Protecting vulnerable people from objectivity) because I'm interested in a more person centred or community focused approach.

Firstly the man was upset when he arrived early at the youth group, and he was clearly upset about the police. This may not be a legal issue, and it may not be an issue for a formal complaint, but he is still upset about the police, and from a person-centered perspective this is an issue that deserves some attention. It's also important that he wasn't trying to gain anything from telling his story, apart from some kind of catharsis probably. He never wanted to make a complaint (I stressed this in the original post). He was simply upset and he told the youth workers what happened to help him calm down.

From a community perspective there are also important issues. I have heard that there have been several similar incidents already in the last few months, and not only the Kurdish community, but also the professionals who work with them are talking about this. Several other people have also come up to me from the English community and told me about similar things that have happened to them, and one person told me that when they tried to complain the police had no record of their detention. This is all circumstantial, and can't be verified, and I'm sorry if the police are upset for a moment about me writing this, but this is what the community are saying, to each other at least. This is not an insignificant issue, for the community or the police, but it seems to me that the lack of corroborable evidence makes it difficult for the police's systems and approaches to deal with.

Community Safety
As I have already mentioned, the police were concerned that the content of the blog could have an impact on community safety within and around the local Kurdish population. I listened to the police's concerns on Friday and I don't want to detract from them, but from the perspective of this blog devoted to ethics and communication this is another opportunity to explore and think about why I disagree with them.

The first thing I said was that I've been trying to encourage people in the refugee and asylum seeking community (and others) to complain if they have a grievance for years, almost completely without success. The reasons people don't want to complain are quite worrying really, certainly disempowering, and do lead to an already vulnerable group of people becoming even more vulnerable in some ways.

Basically people just don't want to rock the boat, they don't want to challenge authority in a way that might cause them more problems. People think that if they complain they might be beaten up, evicted from their properties, or even deported from the UK. I remember one story of illegal working came to light after a man asked for the £20 pounds he was owed for his 10hr shift, only to be beaten so badly and kicked down the stairs that he had to be hospitalised: in the face of this kind of threat which illegal immigrant is going to complain? Another occasion a man went with his brother-in-law (who is incidentally a Home Office registered interpreter based in another part of the country) to report a racist assault, but when his details didn't come up on the computer he was taken into custody for 5 hours while his immigration stutus was checked: the assault was never reported.

The other reason is that this is already what they expected pretty much. This is how they expect to be treated by the police, and it's much better than their own coutries where summary beatings are carried out with rifle butts. England generally is much better in many ways, or at least it's where they want to be at the moment, so they will work for £2 an hour, they will turn their backs on low level racism, they will accept the various trials that come their way. There is a mixed story here: many people like working with refugees because of their strength and humour in the face of adversity - some of them are role models for us all. On the other hand why should people suffer unnecessarily, especially when there are laws and social expectations of good practice that are meant to protect them?

Even today with my more distant relationship to the refugee community I hear quite a lot of stories going round. And the reaction of the community to this story of being detained overnight by the police? People aren't exactly indifferent, but they're not very impressed either, it doesn't seem like a surprising or serious matter to them.

I think this is the real community safety issue, and I'm sorry but I can't see anyone who might threaten community safety taking the time to read through this blog (although I wish they would, they might change their ways). How can we address these issues? The first thing has got to be being able to talk about what's going on, or to read about it, and certainly to think about it. There are lots of organisations who are actively working towards making our communities safer places to live, but this story, and this blog, suggests that there are some continuing issues that need to be looked at in a different way if we are going to effectively deal with them.

Complaints
No complaint was made in this case: neither the Kurdish man, the Police, nor I made a formal complaint. I've already said that Complaints are great, but the practice of them often is not, so in many ways I'm glad.

The Police do have a statutory complaints procedure providing initially for a local resolution of minor complaints, or through the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) for more serious matters.

I've been lucky to have been able to do quite a lot of thinking about complaints over the last nine months, and lucky that it's been in the context of a multi-agency group writing a code of practice. In the light of this experience, and knowing the issues with making complaints under other statutory procedures including that for Social Services and the NHS, I can't help thinking that the proper police procedure is still inadequate in some ways and for some situations.

The main problem is the unwelcoming bureaucracy: if we are going to encourage people to feel that complaints are great, we need to be more open and encouraging about the process, and we need to be going out of our way to support people to make more complaints. This system isn't very encouraging though, and as with many complaints procedures it is tiring and difficult for the complainants.

I also can't help thinking that while the police are very good at investigating crimes, the process of investigating a complaint is quite different, as are the potential outcomes and methods of redress for upheld complaints. I feel that the police culture and experience of investigating crimes is actually a barrier to the sympathetic handling of complaints. It would be interesting to do some research about this perhaps.

Racism
Racism is a very emotive word, and probably not something to put in a headline on a blog. Since these events I have written some thoughts about Racism and discrimination. Racism is a very important issue for me, and I have many friends who experience it at different levels. At the same time however I don't think we should be too upset by it - we need to talk about it and work against it and concentrate on moving on.

The Macpherson Report on the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry provides one positive step in this direction (see here for background), with this definition:

A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.

This definition takes us in two directions which is not all without problems, but while it opens up many more incidents to be counted officially as racist (a relief to the victims), it also takes the focus away from the perpetrator of an incident and away from the criminal law, placing it instead on perceptions and feelings.

In this way we can see that someone may act in a way that they think is positive, but which others may percieve as racist. The Macpherson definition allows a debate to go on around these borderline examples without undue pressure being exerted on those who would previously have been considered 'alleged criminals'. The analogy I tend to draw is with that state of 'marital bliss' where the loving husband (it can work in all sorts of combinations) offers help to his wife: he is just being nice; she thinks he's being patronising (or, why can't he offer to do some of the dirty jobs, or what's his ulterior motive, or...). The point is in this common situation between people who know each other well there can be and quite often are quite different interpretations placed on people's actions.

At least one of the officers on Friday was upset at my implication that police officers could act in a racist way without knowing it. This was seen as a slur on those officers' professional practice, but actually it was meant as a softener, a reminder that even if I agreed with the Kurdish man that police actions had been racist, it was those actions that were the problem, not the individual officers. It was also an indication that there was a learning opportunity here and I wasn't simply going to throw allegations around.

Conclusion
At the end of the meeting we discussed some ways that Advocacy Action could work with the police in future. Obviously I promised not to publish individual officers' names on my blog (although anyone is welcome to publish my name as I work in the community).

More positively we did think about some of the experiences with the police that the community are talking about, and how we can address these issues in a more proactive way.

We thought about developing some simple guidance for young refugees or asylum seekers who may have dealings with the police.

We agreed to pick up the phone more, talk to each other about any issues that come to our attention.

Some hopefully this debate will continue in more practical ways, and I am certainly feeling positive about this outcome.

Interpreters

I've been working with interpreters on and off for six years now. These days what particularly interests me is the links between interpreting and advocacy - particularly as I try to support RASA Advocacy Project in its work with refugees. After all if advocacy is about getting your voice heard, then if English isn't your first language and you don't know the culture or systems you're working with, making your voice heard is an even more challenging task, and more needful and demanding of advocacy support.

There are lots of things to say about interpreting which I can't cover now, but my conclusion has been to use interpreters directly in my work as little as possible. I remember going to meet someone who was about to be evicted on the request of their Social Worker, because he ‘couldn't speak any English at all, and there was something else wrong with him - maybe learning difficulties’ (to paraphrase). I went without an interpreter, and even on that occasion I was able to communicate quite effectively with him. Less than a week later I was having conversations about world politics, migration, economics and art with him. A few weeks later, over a 4 hour conversation (admittedly a long time, but advocates need a long time), I got down the details of his asylum application more thoroughly than any of his previous Home Office interviewers or legal representatives.

This was a particularly vivid example, but it has often been replicated on a smaller scale. I think the key is trust, along with really listening - which requires engaging with the person I'm talking to. The trouble with using an interpreter is that many of the signals each of you is trying to send out can be lost in the translation. All the nuances of language which caring professionals learn to use to put people at ease are reduced to the simple mechanics of interpetation.

If we could train the people we need to communicate with to use interpreters effectively we could manage with this process: they would be interested enough, determined enough, and have the skills to ask all the questions they need to properly understand what we're saying. Unfortunately that isn't the case, and often this is compounded by various issues of the interpreter themselves (e.g. been in England for 20 years and can't actually remember their own language all that well, or from an antagonistic political group, or still bound up with the homophobia prevalent in their native culture, etc.).

Sometimes of course we need to tackle these issues and just make the interpreting process work, and in many jobs it's impractical to use any other method. I recently met a detained asylum seeker, but despite knowing his official broad ethnic origin I found it difficult to determine his actual language, and I was worried that his interpretation and other support needs weren't being met. He did have a 'qualified' and 'registered' interpreter working with him, an interpreter I know already from previous work, and I could have used him. Instead I found a volunteer from RASA.

The gamble paid off very nicely, as it turned out that the two men were almost neighbours in their home country and could communicate very well (unlike the interpreter it turns out, who is from another region and speaks a different dialect). My criteria for choosing this volunteer were quite different though. I wanted an 'ordinary' person with a modest, kind, open, quiet, relaxed and friendly manner; someone who knew the difficulties of the English welfare state, but didn't assume knowledge; someone who spoke enough English to communicate with me, not necessarily to pass exams; someone with experience of advocacy. My volunteer has never acted as an advocate, but I have been his advocate in the past so he knows what he needed to. I've also known him for two years now and he has kindly done other things for me in the past.

The meeting went well. Apparently this was the first time the asylum seeker had spent such a long time engaging with anyone. I got a good picture of his character. He did these little theatrical answers occasionally if I asked a question he didn't like. Much of the meeting went by without being interpreted for me, which was fine for the first session. I didn't get any advocacy goals, and I don't know whether the two will meet again, but I hope after a little reflection I will be asked to arrange another meeting, and anyway I know I can communicate more now that there is some trust and understanding developed.

I had an interesting conversation with the staff afterwards too. They said they could only use properly 'qualified' and 'registered' interpreters, and they couldn't involve my volunteer.

An interesting analogy came to me in that conversation, to do with research methodology. I've recently seen some very badly designed questionnaires going around, in fact questionnaires that seem primarily designed to be able to be analysed (you know the kind - each question has four alternative answers, or you give a number from 1 to 5, bad to good). It seemed to me that the sort of conversations interpreters get involved in are quite similar to these questionnaires: you get an answer, but it's just a summary, the best answer of an unsatisfactory selection.

There is another approach to doing research though, based on interviewing. This approach is much more broad, and the interviews can go in many different directions. It's useful of course to start with an idea of the information you want to get, but at the same time much more relevant learning can be gained in the spaces that are developed between the questions you plan to ask. Of course properly interpreting and evaluating the value of information you get from this process requires even more time and effort, but it seems to me this effort is worth it. My interpreter/volunteer was helping me to go through this process - and it seems completely possible to me for the police or psychiatrists or prison staff to take a similar approach, rather than persevere with registered but sometimes inappropriate professional interpreters.

And that goes for all the rest of us too.

Benefits for psychiatric patients

There have been a few changes to the benefits of some of the patients where I work. This affects patients in Forensic units, and maybe others.

• people on a section 45A or 47 are no longer entitled to benefits until their prison sentence expires
• they will still get 'hospital pocket money' of £16.40 a week
• other people who previously had their benefits cut after 52 weeks will have the full benefit reinstated

Full details are in the DoH circular Changes to benefit entitlements for patients transferred from prison to mental health units, 6 April 2006.

The end of the saga?

I was in Leeds Magistrates' Court again today with Shaun [see previous posts here (1st), here, and here (latest)]. They dropped the case before we even went in, although they did make us wait for 20 mins first.

There are a few points that are worth mentioning I think: although this is a very inconsequential case, it does have some lessons and maybe point to some wider problems. I'm going to be very nit-picky here, but I think it's worth considering these subtle issues because they do make a difference to people going before the courts, even if not to the legal bureaucracy.

1. If we had got into the court, I wouldn't have been able to speak again. I was unhappy last time that I went to speak on Shaun's behalf, and the court official lied to me and I was prevented from speaking. In fact it wasn't that sort of hearing, but I would have understood and accepted this if I'd been told clearly what was going on - there was no need to lie to me.

Today I informed the court immediately that I had come as Shaun's character witness, and they did their job properly - they said the hearing was just to set a court date and to get details of any witnesses that would be called. This is certainly progress, but at the last hearing both Shaun and I were given the clear impression that today would be the actual hearing date - so it seemed to him that I'd needlessly wasted my time again. He didn't have any letter explaining what the purpose of today's hearing was.

2. I think this is fairly typical. I rarely go to Court myself, but I know a variety of people who do end up there more regularly, and I've certainly heard of people turning up to court date after court date only for it to be adjourned again. I can imagine this is particularly difficult for any witnesses who come out of work, ahng around for an hour or something, and then have to rearrange again.

3. It's not just us wasting time. That's two court dates already and who knows how much paperwork by the Police, the Court Service, the Crown Prosecution Service. For a faulty brake light. How much has this cost already?

4. We were told, after 20 mins, that Shaun's case had been looked at and the charges were being dropped. We could 'just go' and we wouldn't hear anything about it again. No letter, no receipt, just go away and forget about it. We couldn't help but compare this to two other things. Firstly when Shaun found out that this hearing was just to set a trial date, he asked if he needed to stay? He was told that if he didn't attend today a warrant would be made out for his arrest - serious stuff - he must stay and go into court. The other thing was his last court appearance when the Police forgot to record that he had produced his documents - what if the Court forget to record that they weren't going to pursue this brake-light case...?

5. Finally, Shaun was saying there's just no accountability for what happened. Five months ago he was stopped by a van-load of Police, falsely accused of drug-dealing, searched, and given a ticket for the minor unrelated issue of a faulty brake-light. Since then the Court Service and the CPS have been involved, the bureaucracy has run its course, and now they're just saying 'forget it all'. What about those police who originally stopped Shaun though? Will they learn of this? Do they think they did anything wrong? Are they sorry? Or will the CPS say 'wait a minute, this was a waste of time and money - we don't want this to happen again, so let's give the Police some feedback...'? It seems unlikely.

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I'm sneaking this post into 'work time', although since I'm not getting paid that's probably not so relevant. Anyway one of my advocacy colleagues has just walked in and heard a bit of the story. His reaction? "I think at the very least Shaun is owed an apology for wasting his time."

I can't see that happening at all, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

A different way of thinking

I'm doing a bit of work a the moment with a homeless man. I wasn't fully recovered from my recent illness perhaps (also why I've missed posting for the last 10 days), but yesterday things didn't run as smoothly as they did before.

There were two problems. Firstly he asked me to fill in a referral form, and I in turn asked him the questions I was being asked. These sorts of direct questions from someone else's referral form aren't the easiest of things to balance with an advocacy approach, and the half answers I was getting didn't seem to match very closely with the things I already half knew. I realised that I was straying into support worker territory, and it was strange, as an advocate, to try to fill in a referral form which was supposed to be from me, in my voice, when in fact I was trying to make this man's voice heard.

The second problem was that during the slightly bizarre form-filling exercise, someone from the Council called. Now we've been getting on quite well, and we appreciate the work we're each doing on this guy's behalf. But after a couple of minutes he starts telling me that the guy is not really credible. He tells me some information from a pre-sentencing report (I do have the authority to know this, and the guy's in the room with me consenting). The Council man is vaguely worried about our guy's credibility, and I can guess that his colleagues are more worried.

So the difficulty I'm having filling in this form is suddenly compounded by other people's vague worries, and I make the mistake of asking my guy directly: why are you being inconsistent and evasive (I didn't use those words, but that was the gist of it).

He then accuses me of accusing him of 'lying'. A hole has suddenly appeared in our relationship.

I don't think he's 'lying' as such. I think he's trying to communicate his need for somewhere to live. I think he's trying to navigate his way through a whole lot of confusing questions. I can see him rooting through scraps of paper that fall out of holes in his pockets or get wet and ruined or thrown away by mistake. These pieces of paper are so closely connected to his story in many ways: some of them contain concrete evidence to support his story, some of them just have phone numbers with no names or other random scraps of information that may or may not be useful or relevant. He tries to save them, to order them, to show some of them to people who might help him (while withholding others). On some wet nights he's lost the whole lot, and they can never be replaced.

The information in his head is very similar. I think he remembers different things at different times. He talks to all sorts of people and they all want different parts of the puzzle. They also interpret the information in all sorts of different ways. It's also true, though I don't want to stress this too much, that many of the people he talks to have a very different level of education, not to mention literacy. Maybe I should say that they think in different ways to him.

Then whenever his credibility or consistency is challenged, it's a challenge to him, to his sense of self. And when he is challenged in this way he defends himself, and he gets stressed and agitated, and then seems even less credible. It's a vicious circle.

At the end of the day this makes him even more vulnerable and in need of housing, but this very vulnerability is being misunderstood and used as an excuse not to offer him services.