Homeless Population: Public Policies and Human Rights in Santos, Brazil

In Brazil, studies on the homeless population are not frequent. In 2009, a Census was conducted in the city of Santos and the answers to the questions: Living on the street? Sleeping on the street? Living from the street? Are these choices ou social determinations? indicated that violence was the central variable.
Violence is present in the reasons for living on the streets - unemployment, breakdown of family ties, loss of housing - determining the use of the street as the living space. The answers concerning the preference for sleeping on the street also reveal, in the services that offer overnight spaces, forms of violence disguised as rules of coexistence that can not be disregarded. As people live and sleep on the streets also gets its living from the street in socially undervalued works, risking the health, in the middle of the trash, of the disposable, as their abused lives, often attacked for those who increase the discrimination.
Existential inequality that means the denial of (equal) recognition and respect, reinforcing the stigma and the invisibility. People who live, sleep and get their living from the streets suffer the most serious forms of inequality, violence and social vulnerability.