A person experiencing homelessness in south London may avoid visiting a GP or shelter because they fear being treated as lesser or unworthy. This research aims to understand and dismantle that stigma. Stigma is a known barrier to care, but current explanations for how it operates across entire systems—healthcare, welfare, policing—remain too vague to guide effective responses. The project focuses on homelessness, where stigma actively worsens health and reduces someone’s chance of escaping the streets. Without better understanding, interventions remain piecemeal and fail to address the root social dynamics. If successful, the team will produce a new, evidence-based intervention framework—called Social Responses to Stigma—developed with people who are homeless and frontline services in south London. The goal is to shift how entire systems treat stigmatised groups, not just individual attitudes. This could mean people seek care sooner, receive better support when they do, and face fewer barriers to housing and rights. The framework is designed to be adaptable, so lessons from homelessness could later be applied to stigma around mental health, addiction, or infectious disease.
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Stigma refers to people being 'marked' - in society's eyes - as lesser, unworthy or disgraced. Stigma can lead to discrimination, or unfair treatment. This stigma and discrimination are challenges across society and cause problems in many of the systems that people interact with, such as health care, welfare and policing. We have some understanding of these social and systemic sides of stigma and their complexity, but not enough to understand how to respond and prevent it. This research aims to improve our explanations for the complexity of stigma and so produce new Social Responses to Stigma. The research is especially focused on stigma and discrimination as it relates to homelessness. The stigma that often focuses on people who are homeless and homelessness is a persistent barrier to addressing ill-health and homelessness. It can mean people don't seek care and support, receive poor quality support if they do, or are excluded from resources and realising their rights. A result is worsening health and reduced chances of ending homelessness. Homelessness is just one experience that is the focus for stigma. Overtime we hope the responses generated can have impact across many different experiences and places The project is led by a team from King's College London based in south London. They are working closely with partners from Emmaus, Groundswell, the Lambeth Service Users' Council, Museum of Homelessness and then other services working directly with people who are homeless across south London. A focus for the research is in-depth study in south London to understand the complexity of the stigma that people who are homeless face. The project partners will then develop new responses to stigma by combining the results from the in-depth study with the views and experiences of people across south London, including people currently homeless and those working with them. The new responses to stigma will initially be implemented in south London. We will work to understand their impacts on the systems that provide services and whether there are improvements in peoples' experiences and health. We will then try and ensure lessons from any success are shared with other places and also used to address the stigma attached to other health issues.
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