68 Banal dehumanisation 1 2 3 4 Persons with homes can perform activities either in their homes or in public. Persons without homes can only perform activities in public. There are some activities that city authorities would like to ban in public (urinating, defecating, cooking, having sex) as this would make public space more pleasant. If persons without homes can only perform activities in public and these activities are made illegal in public, this effectively makes urinating, defecating, cooking and having sex illegal for persons without homes. For Waldron, rules that ban such activities in public without providing alternative provision work on the incorrect assumption that everyone has a home, while in the real world there are people without homes and, for those people, this represents an unacceptable constriction of freedom.35 Waldron goes on to note that as such, homeless persons end up bearing the burden for propertyownership, through their loss of human rights protection.36 However, the problem that Waldron sets up represents something deeper than a constriction of freedom. He describes people who are forbidden from public urination in a context without public toilets. This constrains something more basic than human rights and freedom. It is simply nonsensical. Even if a person wants to comply, it is practically impossible to do so. As such, a set of regulations that could effectively outlaw urination for some people in some place at some time fails adequately to acknowledge human life as it really is. The problem is not that people have a basic interest in urination or even a need to urinate so much as that people just do urinate. Similarly, forbidding a person from standing in any place represents a non-acknowledgement of life. This is dehumanisation at its most brutal. It goes deeper than Jean-François Lyotard’s concern that some humans are not seen as interlocutors. In this case some people are not even seen (recall Esrafil from Chapter 3 who felt that he had to set himself on fire in order to be seen). Photographs 5.1 and 5.2 are part of the series, ‘Still Human Still Here’, produced by photographer Abbie Trayer-Smith, working with refused asylum seekers in the UK. Anne, who Trayler-Smith describes as trying not to spend too long looking out of the window that is shown in Figure 5.1, arrived in the UK after both experiencing and witnessing extreme violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo: She had been detained and beaten for condemning the forced recruitment of child soldiers after her son was taken by rebel forces and her husband killed. On the second occasion, she was raped by the rebels. After forming a women’s group to protest against rebel activity she was forced to watch, paralysed with horror, as three of the women in her group were buried alive 35 Waldron 1991 ibid. 36 Waldron 2009 ibid.