Homeless adults have often struggled with homelessness from a young age, so why are we less tolerant to their plight? Credit:John Donegan Alicia's resilience, her optimism and sheer pluck touched many readers. And why wouldn't it? Trying to get kids off to school isn't always easy, even in the most benign of middle-class households. But here's a remarkable child who, despite extraordinary barriers, dreams of a better future and is working steadily towards it while camping rough on a patch of urban wasteland. How could anyone not be touched? Like Alicia, many people who are homeless demonstrate more courage, resilience and creativity than many of us are ever called on to muster. Far from being the dregs of our society, the homeless are often some of our most exemplary citizens. Even from a mercenary social-Darwinist perspective, it could be argued that for such individuals to endure in the face of deprivation, abuse and illness demonstrates superior genes. Alicia's story reveals a paradox. People in Alicia's situation get older. The 30 or 40-year-old people living homeless today were often homeless kids before they became homeless adults. They just never got a break and now they are far less likely to evoke sympathy. David was an angelic looking 18-year-old when I met him in 1998. He was sleeping in a derelict house in Clifton Hill. Despite his poverty he dreamt of becoming an architect. He borrowed books on design from the local library which he kept under a plastic sheet to protect them from dust.

David had fled from home a couple of years earlier after his mum's boyfriend started sexually abusing him. Above all else David wanted to participate in the life of his community. He was articulate, motivated and well presented. He travelled to Sydney to study building design, his eyes ablaze with ambition. It never happened. When I met David 10 years later he was unrecognisable and still dealing with the trauma of child abuse. He was overweight, covered in tattoos and scars and deeply engaged in drug use. He had sustained brain damage from street fights and overdoses. Today David has trouble expressing himself verbally and from his fearsome appearance it's clear people sometimes cross the road to avoid walking past him. He sometimes begs to raise money and has become used to being called a "bludger" or a "loser". Few people today would feel compassion on seeing David but anyone who knew David as a hopeful, courteous young man would still feel compassion for him now. David didn't deliberately fail - our society failed to find him a nurturing space. It's easy to see why we prefer our charity to be directed towards those we think of as virtuous. If you're an older person with a history of transience, mental ill-health, substance use and challenging behaviour, you may not be as easy to like. It doesn't help that media depictions of poverty, begging and drug use are often a catalyst for derision and mockery. Just look at or Struggle Street - or every third story on commercial TV current affairs. We are regularly told that the poor are not like the rest of us. In dividing people into categories of worth and making assumptions that some people should be saved while others should be banished, we are treading close to fascism.

In his book The Establishment, British firebrand journalist Owen Jones presents an excoriating description of class warfare in Britain. His account of how public opinions of poor people are formed is intriguing. He asserts quite convincingly that for decades media has encouraged us to direct our frustrations at easy targets - minority groups, the homeless, migrants, the unemployed - to distract us from the fact that society is fundamentally unfair and poor people are robbed of opportunities. Is this a worldwide phenomenon, perhaps? The phrase "blaming the victim" springs to mind. It's a lot safer to call people failures than see them in the context of a society that is constructed to reward some and dump on others. Not even the hardest heart can blame a child for their homelessness and it's no wonder we want to help them. We wait until the child grows up before we decide they're fair game for our scorn or our indifference. Chris Middendorp is a Melbourne-based community worker.