Preface and Overview
Within this handbook, the right to privacy for veterans living in facilities that cater to their individual needs will be treated. The case study included in Part III goes to the legal concept of intrusion more than any other of the four concepts of tort of privacy as in Part I. However, video footage of a person smoking outside of a “homeless shelter” may be considered embarrassing in some manner, due to negative connotations associated with the term of “homeless.” As a user of this handbook, as an employee or staff of a facility catering to veterans, individuals may have to stay temporarily in certain facilities for just a brief time which does not fall into the full meaning of the term “homeless,” and without the basic defense of privacy violations – consent or newsworthiness – the exact status of a person’s situation should never be publicized. Homeless is defined in the box below as an exercise in exploring possible negativity that can be association with the term.
home·less
ˈhōmləs/
adjective
-
(of a person) without a home, and therefore typically living on the streets.
"the plight of young homeless people"
synonyms: of no fixed address, without a roof over one's head, on the streets, vagrant, displaced, dispossessed, destitute, down-and-out.
"homeless people"
people of no fixed address, vagrants, down-and-outs, street people, tramps, vagabonds,itinerants, transients, migrants, derelicts, drifters, hoboes;
informalbag ladies, bums
"charities for the homeless"
And with the advent of digital video and photography, and the journalist over use of their First Amendment protections while tramping on the individual right to privacy; images of a person can be made either in foreground or background, without newsworthiness or consent being established.
These things being said, this is not an isolated case as veterans are 50 percent more likely to end up homeless than non-veterans, and the symptom of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are a major contributor to those statistics. “We house more Iraq and Afghanistan and younger veterans than older veterans,” Joe Leal, an Army veteran who founded a group to get homeless vets off the street, told NBC News. “It used to be where a homeless vet was typically about 60 years old. Now, they’re 22-years old” (O'Donnell, 2012). These things being considered, along with the lingering effects of the PTSD still being present Vietnam veterans to this day (VA, 2007), it is not a hard assumption to conclude that these issues will continue for some time. And as these issues with these younger military veterans will continue, the media will undoubtedly continue to show interest. And as the journalistic ethical cannons require--as demonstrated in Part II-- the media will continue to cover this story as they hold strong to their ethics and values, so as to seek the truth. For these reasons, it is important for veteran facilities and staff to continue their mandate of servicing veterans by ensuring that privacy rights be maintained while continuing to adhere to respectful adherence to the First Amendment.