La Covid-19 et le sans-abrisme. Enquête sociologique sur l’engagement institutionnel et l’éthique de l’action des intervenants du médico-social auprès des sans-abri dans le cadre de l’épidémie (COVABRI)
Résumé
March 2020, France is confined. But how can you be confined to your home when you live on the streets or in collective shelters?
As housing has become the central social space for experiences of confinement during the Covid-19, our study focuses on those who are excluded from it: houseless, homeless or rough sleepers. How were they contained and protected in this pandemic context? By whom? In what way? In what type of housing? And with what consequences? The COVABRI study aims to analyze how homeless, usually sheltered, fed or cared, have been confined and protected during this period. The COVABRI research relies on a sociology of assistance to the homeless in pandemic period, in order to provide an understanding of the adjustments of public action towards the most vulnerable and logics behind the implemented actions in this crisis context where the need for action is required and urgent.
Our investigation was focused to the city of Saint-Étienne in order to understand the administrative, legal and practical organization of assistance to the homeless. Guided by the triptych - shelter, food, care -, to understand a plurality of viewpoints on public action the qualitative survey was carried out with field stakeholders, professionals, volunteers, activists and homeless people. The research team conducted individual interviews, observations on the sites of assistance, as well as group interviews. This ethnographically inspired approach led us to document the changes at work as well as the issues at stake, whether in the areas of housing, care or food aid. The field survey started the first days of the first confinement in March 2020 and continued until March 2022, following the uncertainties health crisis’ management: confinement, deconfinement, curfews, exit hours, closures of so-called non-essential places and then partial reopenings, etc.
The COVABRI survey underlines three central actions in the public response to the pandemic: taking homeless people off the streets in order to comply with security measures related to containment, trying to space out individuals housed in crowded collective facilities, and isolating homeless people who were ill with covid-19. These actions exacerbate the social, security, medical, and humanitarian dimensions of assistance. The COVABRI survey also highlights an unprecedented situation: food insecurity. Due to the closure of food distributions held by the charitable and humanitarian sector, and the prohibition of access to public space, the homeless no longer had access to the quantity and quality of foodstuffs. The study explored how non-food aid actors mobilized and cooperated, in an transient period, to deal with this food insecurity.
The results of the survey have been used in several applications: scientific communications (national and international symposiums, seminars); scientific publications (articles in the process of being published in peer-reviewed journals); presentations in social work training modules as well as feedback to the participants of the survey in new formats: a participatory timeline, podcasts (freely available on arte radio), and a conference.
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