3. Explain the current situation and express your opinion on a social issue: homelessness

Homelessness describes the condition of people without a regular dwelling. People often don’t have any opportunity to acquire good housing. There are though places where they manage to stay and eat like homeless shelters, cardboard boxes.

As statistics show, the majority of homeless are men (about 75-80%), most of them are single.

Reasons and causes of homelessness in sociology:

1. Unavailability of employment opportunities

2. Family breakdown or tragedy

3. Poverty

4. Wars

5. Mental disorders

6. Lack of accessible healthcare (especially who has chronic weakness)

7. Social exclusion (including family problems)

8. Prison

Most of them, unfortunately, have drug/alcohol addiction.Problems faced by people who are homeless:

• personal security, quiet, and privacy, especially for sleeping

• safekeeping of bedding, clothing and possessions, which may have to be carried at all times

• hygiene and sanitary facilities

• cleaning and drying of clothes

• obtaining, preparing and storing food in quantities

• keeping contacts, without a permanent location or mailing address

• hostility and legal powers against urban vagrancy.

But anyway, In 2005, an estimated 100 million people worldwide were homeless. Look and think about this fact – we see them often but we didn’t even realize that there’re so many people homeless.

Governments and organizations are trying to fight the problem itself – but the problem has its roots in social life that homeless people had before they got homeless. Of course, life is always unfair and our life is full of tragedies - but the more homeless people exist, the more concerned the government should be – homelessness often indicated problem, that a government faces but doesn’t want to solve.

There are nowadays a lot of strategies to solve this problem or reduce the number of people – offer them jobs (that are very hard and not rewarding), offer orphanages and provide people with food. But still. I’m sure that problem comes from the social system that is connected with economic and political systems. So the solution is to prevent people from being excluded from the society and feeling miserable and desperate. And of course, try to convince homeless people that everything will be alright and help them.

4. Explain the current situation and express your opinion on a social issue: drug abuse and drug-related crimes.

The addition of drugs is one of the most important problems of all mankind nowadays. Drugs kill it’s victims and make millions for those who sell it. Drug traffic forms a huge number of illegal organizations which often commit various crimes. The main part of all drugs comes from Afghanistan and Latin America. The UN has made huge steps to limit the appearance of cocaine and others drugs in Bolivia and Columbia. So the main point for Eastern Europe and Russia is Afghanistan. According the statistics there are nearly 500.000 drug addicts in Russia. It is terrible, of course, and such situation must be treated as soon as possible. But the question of drugs is rather complicated. There are 2 types of drugs which are legalized all over the world – nicotine and alcohol. It is much lighter than heroine or opium, but still year after year it makes harm for thousands of people.