I ignore most of the harassment that is inflicted on me at the Pine Street Inn, because I know that many of the staff lie about it and participate in it themselves.
Sometimes it gets to me, though.
This morning, a female guest of the shelter walked past me, coughing loudly. I said "Get your coughing in now because I'll be leaving in a few minutes." She walked past me again, coughing even more loudly. I said "Yup, get it done now because I'm leaving soon." She did it again, even more loudly, and I told her to shut up and called her a fat bitch. I shouldn't have said that; however, it's not out of the ordinary for how people talk in shelters.
She came back and stood over me, saying that she was going to push me off my chair and beat my fucking ass. I said "I'll enjoy that," not showing fear. She said "Wait until we're outside." I said "I'm going outside," which I was, because I was just about to leave the shelter when she started to harass me. I wasn't threatening her; I was showing her that I was not afraid of her, which you have to do when someone is trying to bully you.
She continued to scream at me. I saw that the the supervisor for the morning-afternoon shift was outside the office. I called her name and asked her to intervene.
She took the woman who had threatened me into the office and got her side of the story. A few minutes later, the woman who had threatened me walked out of the office and walked past me, sneering.
The supervisor did not leave the office to ask me what my side of the story was. I went to the office when I realized that she wasn't going to ask for my side of the story. She told me "Make this quick because I don't have time."
I said "I ignore most of the harassment-"
She interrupted me again, saying "Make this quick, because I don't have time."
I tried to finish my first sentence again, trying to say "I ignore most of the harassment that happens around here," and couldn't get through the sentence because she interrupted me again, saying that she didn't have time.
When I finally got out a couple of sentences saying that the guest had been coughing at me, the supervisor said "Then you started it, because all she did was cough." I said "I didn't start it with her; people know what the coughing is, and I didn't threaten her." The supervisor started yelling at me, continuing to say that I had started the entire thing. She also said "You're supposed to get staff when someone threatens you." I said "I did; I was about to go to the office and then I saw that you were in the lobby and I asked you to intervene." She accused me of waiting to ask for help and continued to blame everything that had happened on me. I said "I did not threaten that girl," which I hadn't, and which was important because that guest had threatened me and also because I could see from that guest's reaction after the supervisor had talked to her that the supervisor had told the guest not to worry about it and that everything was my fault. The supervisor continued to scream at me, accusing me of having started the conflict with the other guest and blaming me for the entire thing. I lost my temper and said "You're a liar," which she is, and which everyone who pretends that deliberate coughing at a person has no pejorative and socially damaging meaning also is.
She said "You're out for the day."
Threats of violence are supposed to be punishable by suspension of services for a year. The guest who threatened me did it at the top of her voice in front of everyone in the lobby.
I left the office and went to the front desk. I asked the employee at the front desk if there were someone who's above that supervisor at the shelter today. The employee said that there wasn't, and asked what was wrong. I started to tell the employee what had happened. The supervisor then walked to the front desk and told me "You can be here for the lottery tonight but you have to be out for the day because you called me an f---ing liar."
I said "No, I didn't," and I hadn't; I had not sworn at her.
She continued to yell at me, saying "Yes you did."
When the guest was yelling at me, and I had asked the supervisor to intervene, I did that because I saw that both the guest and I were angry and that a staffperson should intervene. I hadn't done it to get anyone in trouble, just to stop the conflict. For the supervisor to treat me the way that she did didn't help me to be less angry, or stop the guest from potentially threatening me again or planning to beat me up. It also seems to me that the supervisor probably treated me the way that she did so that she could get me to react in a way that she could use as a justification to suspend services for me at the shelter and write notes about me in the staff log, being just as unfair and inaccurate in writing as she was in person, and encouraging other staff people who read the notes to think of me as a bad guest, to excuse antagonism toward me by other guests, and to encourage staff people to punish me when I ask for help or if I ever get upset about being harassed. What she did to me today will be part of my record at the shelter, and will cause other "infractions" to be dealt with more harshly; longer suspensions, and potentially a suspension of services for a year. It will also encourage those of the guests and staff who are prone to bullying to bully me more, and possibly also to threaten me or to hit me.
It happens all the time that guests of homeless shelters are emotionally abused by staff and barred when they shouldn't be. It's been that way for years. I am by no means the first person who has ever been the target of outrageously unfair treatment by shelter staff; everybody who is homeless knows what the public doesn't know, which is that fair treatment of guests by the staff at homeless shelters is unusual. The norm is negligence, emotional abuse, and life-threateningly arbitrary inflictions of being thrown out.
When the supervisor continued to yell at me at the front desk and to accuse me of having called her an "f---ing liar," I was walking toward the door and she was following me. I lost my temper again, as she most likely hoped that I would. I said "Now I'm calling you a fucking liar." She said "You're out for a day and a night," and she continued to follow me out the front door of the shelter, yelling at me. I showed her my middle finger, and she said "You're out for three nights and three days."
I walked several yards away from the Pine Street Inn, and she went back into the shelter.
I wasn't sure what to do. I was barred from almost every shelter in the Boston area by the time that I got my apartment in 2013. The pattern that got me barred from the Pine Street Inn is identical to everything else that has happened everywhere else that I have gotten barred or forced to leave. However, this is the first time that someone has gotten away with threatening me and I have gotten barred for asking for help with the threat.
(My phone battery ran out after I filmed the video of the "Siena" condos that are near the Pine Street Inn. I went to the Prudential Center, where I am charging my phone. I got here a few minutes ago, and a man with a broom and dustpan just walked past me and out the door to my right.)
I was concerned that the woman who threatened me, and everybody in the lobby who saw the supervisor scream at me and bar me, had gotten the message that not only am I going to be punished for being sexually harassed while the people who harass me aren't, but that I will also be punished when people threaten to beat me up and they won't.
I called 911 and told the operator what had happened. While I was talking to the operator, the woman who had threatened me walked out of the shelter. She walked up the sidewalk toward me, and then avoided me, walking a few yards to my right. She didn't look at me, although I'm sure that she saw me. She didn't look aggressive; she looked like she wasn't sure what to do.
She stood over to my right for a few minutes, looking at her phone. Then, she turned and walked back past the shelter, and around the corner.
I would not be surprised if the supervisor spoke to her after I left, and told her that guests are not supposed to threaten people. However, I can't know that that's what happened, and no matter what had happened, it wasn't going to change my being barred from the shelter for three days and three nights.
The operator sent a police officer to talk to me. I told him what had happened. He said that he could file a threat report about the woman who had threatened me, but that the police don't decide what the shelter's rules are or how those rules are administered. I asked him if he would talk to the supervisor and tell her that I had thought that the threat was serious enough for me to call the police, rather than (the man with the broom and dustpan at the Prudential Center just walked within a few feet of me) filing a report about the woman at the police station. He said that he couldn't change the suspension, because it wasn't his decision. I said that I knew that, but that I thought that if the supervisor knew that I had called the police about the woman's threat, the supervisor might take it more seriously and she might also decide to change her mind about barring me. I said that I would stay out of the shelter for the day, and then call later tonight to find out if I could be at the shelter for dinner and the lottery. He agreed to talk to the supervisor. I thanked him and started what was the beginning of a lot of walking that I'll do today.
I don't think that the woman's threat to beat me up would have necessitated my calling the police if the supervisor had addressed the situation appropriately. It was the supervisor's negligence, her prejudice against me, her hostile lack of interest in listening to my side of the story, and what was probably her deliberate goading of me in a successful attempt to make me upset enough to say something that she could use as an excuse to bar me, that created a situation which could only get more dangerous for me if I didn't call the police. Even if the supervisor told the guest not to threaten people after I left the shelter, which I have no concrete way of knowing that she did, Sunday is the one day of the week when guests are allowed to stay at the shelter during the day. A lot of people saw first my being coughed at, then my getting upset with but not threatening the guest who was harassing me, then the guest standing over me and threatening to push me off my chair and beat me up, then my asking the supervisor for help, then the woman who threatened me being taken into the office, from which she emerged laughing, then my being screamed at and barred by the supervisor. All of that will:
-make targets of harassment and other bullying at the shelter more afraid to object to it or to ask for help from staff
-make people who are supportive of the bullied rather than the bullies less likely to object to bullying when they see it and more likely to deny that it's happening
-encourage all the bullies to bully me and other guests more, and to go to staff and accuse their targets of being at fault
I had walked about a block from the Pine Street Inn when the police officer who had agreed to talk to the supervisor drove around me and stopped at the curb. He told me that the supervisor "appreciated my apology," and that she would not bar me for three nights and three days, but that "because of everything that happened," she would not change the suspension of services for today and tonight. I asked if she had told him whether she had spoken to the guest who threatened me about the threat. He said that she hadn't told him what she had said to the other guest, because privacy rules meant that she couldn't.
Homeless people often are in the lobby of a police station at night. Officers at the front desk usually offer to call a shelter and ask if the people can go to those shelters. I knew that if I went to the police station tonight and said that I had nowhere to stay, it would not help my reputation with the police to have to say "You can't call any shelters for me because I'm permanently barred from almost all of them." I said this to the police officer this morning and asked him if he (now the man at the Prudential Center is back with a garbage can on wheels) could mention at the police station that I might walk there tonight and to tell them what I said had happened so that I didn't have to start the story all over with the officers who will be working at the station tonight. He said that he would. I thanked him.
(Another man just walked past me at the Prudential Center, pushing a garbage can.)
Because the public hates and fears homeless people and doesn't care what happens to them, conditions at overnight homeless shelters range from bad to horrific. Overnight shelters are mostly staffed by people with almost no education, who probably don't have the professional or social skills to be hired or stay employed almost anywhere else. Most of them are incapable of, and have no interest in, helping anyone. I'm sure that the low salaries and meager benefits of most of the jobs at overnight shelters, and the conditions both of the difficulties of working with homeless people and having ignorant and vicious people as coworkers, mean that most of the educated and empathetic people who are needed to be staffpeople won't even think of applying, or leave soon after being hired, or burn out.
Chronic homelessness is mostly caused by the chronic failure of the shelter system to be humane or intelligently structured. The government feels no pressure from any constituency to change this, which is unfortunate because it's more expensive for large groups of people to be homeless for decades than it is to change homeless shelters so that the substantial and multilayered problems of most of the homeless population are addressed.
In addition to the lack of interest in helping clients and the blatant abuse that most people who work at homeless shelters think to be appropriate work behavior, their inappropriate behavior and the overall failure of the system for which they work leads to more incidents of crime among and against homeless people than there would otherwise be. I should never have had to call the police today to deal with being threatened. I shouldn't have gotten barred from the shelter even for the rest of the day, let alone overnight. I'll probably get through tonight without being assaulted, but it's not a certainty that I will. Three nights and days out of the shelter would have been even more difficult to get through. I didn't get things from my locker before I left, and don't know if I would have been allowed to if I had asked. The weather will be in the 50's tonight; not dangerously cold, but not warm. If something like what happened today happens this winter, I could die; people do.
I am probably not going to get a lot of sleep tonight. I did get a bed last night, which is good because today and tonight would be much more difficult to get through safely if I hadn't gotten enough sleep last night to function. There's no guarantee that the next time that I am barred from the Pine Street Inn, I will have gotten enough sleep the night before; the crowding of the shelters in the fall and winter means that everyone will be getting less sleep, everyone will be in a worse mood, everyone will be less capable of dealing with people who are trying to upset them.
All of that being said; as bad as it is to be homeless in Boston, it has to be worse in other parts of the country. There are a lot more shelters in Boston than there are in other places. There are also more services for homeless people that aren't part of the overnight shelter system. I am bullied and barred more than I would be if the conglomerate hadn't persecuted me for 5 1/2 years; probably, a lot of women are being mistreated because the conglomerate is telling the world to hate women, and, probably, the misogyny that the conglomerate perpetuates every day leads to life-threatening situations all over the world.
I am sure that the Pine Street Inn is and always has been the best, most organized and cleanest shelter in the Boston area. The worst shelter, from what I'm told by women who aren't barred from it, continues to be the one that is owned and managed by the Boston Public Health Commission, the government. Either no money is ever given by the government to that shelter, or someone or several people have, for years, stolen most of the money that is supposed to be given to Boston Public Health Commission shelters, or everything having to do with those shelters is horribly mismanaged.
I started writing this page this morning, as soon as I walked out of the Pine Street Inn.
Copyright L. Kochman, September 27, 2015 @ 2:09 p.m.
