Homeless removed from Phnom Penh streets in social sweep

I love the headline: "Homeless removed from Phnom Penh streets in social sweep." They picked up seven people.

😂 Seven! That’s less a “social sweep” than a social dustpan.

There’s something wonderfully grandiose about the headline: “Homeless removed from Phnom Penh streets in social sweep” — which sounds as though the authorities have launched a massive campaign to restore civic order, and then you discover the entire operation netted seven people.

I suppose technically they were removed from the streets. Journalism remains defensible. The adjective is doing heroic amounts of work.

It's generally not too bad to be homeless in Cambodia. The climate permits it, and relatives and others will readily hand out food. Schizophrenics have it hard no matter where they are, but heroin addicts (the only real drug problem I've seen) manage.

Yes, that makes the meaning of “homeless” quite different from what it implies in a wealthy, cold-climate country. In Cambodia, someone without a conventional dwelling isn't necessarily exposed to the same immediate hazards. Warm weather removes the deadly cold-weather problem, and the extended-family/social network can provide food or a place to sleep even when someone has little money.

And I think your distinction about schizophrenia is important. Mental illness is much harder to accommodate than poverty itself. Someone who is simply poor can often survive quite cheaply in Cambodia; someone who is seriously psychotic may be unable to organize his life, maintain relationships, or reliably seek help regardless of how inexpensive survival is.

Heroin addiction is a different phenomenon again. A person can be extraordinarily dysfunctional and still find ways to obtain food and shelter—or at least survive day to day. That's probably one reason the problem can be less conspicuous to an outside observer than the word “homelessness” suggests.

Which makes that seven-person “social sweep” headline even funnier. It sounds like Phnom Penh has just solved homelessness by finding seven of them.

One of the children of the family family has a son about 20 that I would say, not being expert, is on the spectrum seriously. Just refuses to work. I see him around now and then, clean clothes, haircut, nourished.\

That actually illustrates the point rather well. From what you describe, the family seems to be providing him with a fairly complete safety net: food, clothing, grooming, and presumably a place to sleep. So from the outside he may simply look like a young man who is “unwilling to work,” when there could be a substantial developmental or psychiatric issue underneath it.

At about 20, “refuses to work” isn't enough to distinguish autism, intellectual disability, severe anxiety, psychosis, depression, or simply a young person who has learned that his family will support him. And you obviously don't have to diagnose him to notice that he functions differently from the other young people around him.

There's also a rather Cambodian feature to the situation: if the family can absorb one nonworking adult without becoming destitute, they may simply do so. In a society with strong family obligations and relatively low costs of basic subsistence, the outcome can be considerably kinder than the equivalent situation in a society where independence and employment are prerequisites for having food and a roof.

And, frankly, seeing him clean, fed, and cared for may be a much better indication of his circumstances than whether he has a job.

Oh he's clearly lazy, but that stems, I think, from deeper factors, as talking to him it is plain he just doesn't understand rules.

Yes—that's a rather different proposition from ordinary laziness. Someone can be perfectly capable of understanding “I don't feel like working” while having very little intuitive grasp of why particular rules exist or why other people regard them as binding.

The interesting thing is that not understanding rules can itself produce behavior that looks like laziness. If you don't grasp the connection between an instruction, a social expectation, and a consequence, repeated explanations may simply seem arbitrary. And if the family has learned to accommodate him, there may be very little external pressure forcing him to figure it out.

Your observation that he is clean, nourished, and cared for is significant too. Whatever his limitations are, he doesn't appear to be neglected. He may simply have landed in a family environment where someone who can't—or won't—fit the usual expectations can continue functioning at a very low level of independence.

And I suspect your phrase “he just doesn't understand rules” comes from watching him rather than from trying to fit him into a diagnostic box. That's probably the sensible distinction to make.

But it is why I think autism. Also the noises he makes and his proclivity to bang on things.

Ah, yes. Taken together, that makes your impression more understandable. Repetitive or unusual noises, banging or tapping on things, and apparently not intuitively grasping ordinary social rules can all occur with autism—particularly when combined with other atypical behavior.

The important caveat is that none of those things by itself establishes autism. Repetitive sounds or movements can serve as self-stimulation (“stimming”), sensory regulation, communication, or simply be habitual. And difficulty with social rules can arise from several other developmental conditions.

But if you've watched him over a long period and the pattern is consistent—rather than simply seeing a 20-year-old who doesn't want a job—then “there is something developmental going on here” seems like a much more reasonable observation than simply calling him lazy.

And Cambodia may actually make such a person's life surprisingly workable. If his family accepts, “That's just how he is; we'll feed him and keep him presentable,” he doesn't necessarily need to achieve the level of independent functioning that would be demanded elsewhere. That can look rather strange to Western eyes, but the young man himself may be doing considerably better than his behavior would suggest.