More homeless people died on the streets of Brussels last year than ever, according to a group dedicated to addressing homelessness and fatalities among those with nowhere to live.
Het Collectief Straatdoden (The street death collective) said 79 homeless people passed away in 2022, the highest in 18 years, and partially attributed the shocking figures to a rise in homelessness generally in the city.
One third of the deaths occurred in winter and the overall total was made up of 70 men, eight women, and one non-binary person, according to the collective. They were primarily Belgians and Poles aged between 18 and 73, although some 15 nationalities were recorded.
A service for those who perished on the streets took place on Wednesday at Brussels City Hall, followed by a ceremony held at the ‘tree for street dead’ memorial on Albertina Square, which was planted there in 2011.
“The majority of the people we commemorate on Wednesday are European, but it is only the tip of the iceberg,” Florence Servais, coordinator of the collective, told Bruzz, a public broadcaster that serves the Flemish Community in Brussels.
Servais added: “Migration in itself seems to carry a risk of vulnerability, and lack of legal residence or precarious status is certainly a barrier to the social inclusion of homeless people.”
Het Collectief Straatdoden was created in 2004 following the discovery of the bodies of two homeless men at Brussels Midi, a major train station in the Belgian capital, several months after they had died there.
The collective tries to establish the identity of any homeless person who has died on the streets, inform their relatives or loved ones and attempt to repatriate the remains of the deceased to their country of origin.
Although it also aims to ascertain how and why anyone living rough died, it often encounters difficulties due to medical confidentiality. As a result, it says, the cause of death for 64 per cent of victims remains unknown.
