Increasing Awareness about Homeless Youth: Consider the Numbers
~ By Colette
November 16 to 22 is National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week. To highlight the important needs of homeless youth, as well as how we can better serve them, we will be focusing on this important topic in the blog this month. Each week we will feature a new blog post about homeless youth written by our staff as well as guest authors.
When thinking about how to start the conversation on homeless youth, I thought a few quick facts about the number of youth who are homeless would be interesting. However, I discovered that getting such data can be frustrating. A Google search will definitely bring up some quick stats, but we need to be careful and consider what those stats are representing. For example, “homeless” youth are generally defined as those youth who have little or no connection with their families or caretakers and lack adult supervision. This does not include the youth who are homeless with their families. However, data on family homelessness appears to generally revolve around families which are being housed in emergency shelters and transitional housing, missing those living in their cars, with relatives, etc. Additionally, many people only discuss homeless families as those including very young children.
The issues of how homelessness is defined and how homeless people are counted is a concern because, as noted by prominent researcher Yvonne Vissing, “The definition that one uses to count homeless people not only determines how many people can be counted as ‘officially homeless’, but it also determines the amount and type of resources that will be made available to help them.” Therefore, how we define and count homeless people becomes political.
Dr. Vissing related the story of a school counselor who did a very thorough job of counting the homeless students in her school using the McKinney Vento definition of “individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” However, when the state numbers were published the school was chastised for having so many homeless students, and the counselor’s estimates were considered an embarrassement to the community instead of a reflection of the hidden economic reality that affected so many of the students. Instead of being encouraged to continue doing what was right – adequately identifying students so they could be served – the community was chastised for failing its citizens.
Keeping these important issues in mind, what do we know about how many youth are homeless? It has been estimated that between 5-7% of the general teenage population will experience at least one episode of homelessness each year. That translates to about 1 to 1.5 million youth who will be living on their own, on the street, without a parent or guardian.
For families, on any given night, about 248,500 persons in families are homeless (living in a shelter or transitional housing), and 58% of the children in these families are over the age of five.
Again, though, when we look at this data we need to consider exactly who is being counted, who is NOT being counted, who is doing the counting, and why. The numbers provided above must be considered low estimates because of the definitions that were used.
For more information about homeless youth and how to assist them there are several good web sites, including:
The National Network for Youth which is working at “Giving Homeless Youth a Voice”
and
The National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.
Additionally, since homeless youth are more likely to be victimized, I’d like to draw your attention to our free article this month “Understanding and Responding to Teen Victims: A Developmental Framework.” This article will be free throughout the month of November.
November 7th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Great piece! Thanks for teasing out the differences in the statistics that make a real difference in communicating the issues around teen and family homelessness – and for shedding some light on an attitude that is probably pretty common in communities. Here in rural Pierce County, WA, people would assume that homelessness doesn’t exist, since it’s not a big city or urban area…an absence of cardboard homes lead people to believe that family homelessness isn’t an issue – but it’s something our teens are facing in multitudes. All the more with the housing issues. Thanks for your hard work! J. Anderson
November 11th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Thanks! Nice post.