An increasing number of children in France are left to sleep in the streets, warns Unicef France in a yearly report that shows nearly 2,000 children were sleeping rough at the start of this school year, a nearly 20 percent increase from last year.
"Children and teenagers are not serene faced with [the problem of] how to get a normal education if you don't know where you are going to sleep at night," says Pierre Imhoff-Guiserix, who coordinates a day centre for homeless families in Strasbourg, called Loupiote
Each day the centre receives about 50 individual children, and in 2023 so far, 387 new families have come for services - more than a hundred more than in 2022. Many of them are asylum seekers, in administrative limbo.
"The issue that concerns us is the number of families on the street when we close. There are about 30 families that have no solution at the end of the day," he said, recorded as part of the fifth annual report on children in the street published by Unicef and the Federation of solidarity actors (FAS), which recorded an increase in the number of children sleeping rough over the past year.
The report tracked calls to 115, the national emergency housing phone number, on the night of 21 August 2023.
Of the people involved in family units who called that night, 3,745 did not get a bed, including 1,990 children – 480 under the age of three years old.
Among the children, nearly 80 percent reported having slept rough the day before the call.
Psychological and physical impacts
The impacts are serious for children, who suffer from the uncertainty of where they are going to sleep.
"We quickly see the psychological and physical state of parents and children degrade quickly," says Imhoff-Guiserix, adding that if children are in school, at least they have a place to be during the day.
"The team at the school is aware of the family's situation, and they are flexible. They can set up a bed in the infirmary for some children to sleep. The children often eat at the cantine. So from morning to evening, they are off the street, in a situation that protects them."
The report notes that its numbers underestimate the problem, as about 30 to 40 percent more people no longer call the housing number, knowing they will not get a bed.
Added to this are families with children living in squats or other precarious situations, and unaccompanied minors, who were not counted as part of the study.
'Temperature-based' policy
Whatever the numbers, the report shows things are getting worse, with more 2.5 times more children sleeping in the street than 18 months ago.
This is partly due to a general precariousness in the population, with people facing increased costs of living and inflation, and a housing crisis made worse by new energy efficiency regulations that have made many housing units no long available to rent.
The Paris region has been particularly impacted, and it is from where the study recorded the highest number of housing requests. However, the situation is problematic in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Hauts-de-France and Occitanie regions.
The authors of the study say the government has failed to uphold a promise in 2022 to eradicate child homelessness with a “no child in the street” policy.
While some efforts were made to open housing units during the 2022-2023 winter season, housing advocacy groups noted a wave of evictions as soon as the weather improved, and the study deplores what it calls “housing management by the thermometre”.
“Winter is generally a time when people are aware of the fate of homeless people,” wrote the authors. “However, they – and children in particular – suffer just as much from the impacts of heatwaves, which are more frequent and intense because of climate change.”
Call to action
The report notes that in addition to those children who are sleeping in the streets are the thousands who live precariously, like the 29,780 living in hotels.
The number of hotel beds is not only insufficient, but it is also “unsatisfactory” because it is temporary - only a few weeks or months - and not adapted to young children.
Unicef and FAS insist that the government has the ability to address the problem.
"We are in a period that is degrading and is not improving, whereas we believe we have the means to improve the situation,” Nathalie Latour, director of the FAS, told RFI.
"Housing is the receptacle of all the insufficiencies of public policies. We’ve been warning about housing for several years, and now we’re seriously alerting,”
Instead of reacting to emergencies, she would like to see a more long-term, structural solution to tackle the problem of housing, and the study urges lawmakers to address the issue starting in the 2024 budget to be voted in the next few weeks.
