Poverty leading cause of youth homelessness
Major study led by U of T professor looked at problem across 24 countries
Poverty — not delinquency — is the leading cause of youth homelessness around the world, according to a groundbreaking international study led by a University of Toronto researcher.
The study, published online Monday by JAMA Pediatrics, analyzes research on youth homelessness involving more than 13,500 young people in 24 countries, including Canada and the United States and is believed to be the first of its kind.
“If we want to help these kids, policy-makers need to understand why they take to the streets,” said the study’s lead researcher Paula Braitstein, associate professor of epidemiology at U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
“Given our study’s findings, criminalizing youth or instituting policies that assume they are thieves, delinquents or drug addicts, won’t help,” added Braitstein, who is based in Kenya and holds a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Applied Public Health Chair.
The study provides more evidence of why Ontario’s so-called antisqueegee law should be abolished, say advocates opposed to the province’s Safe Streets Act, introduced by the former Conservative government in 1999 to deter panhandling and other activities used by homeless people to survive.
“In Canada, we tend to think of more charitable responses to homelessness, like soup kitchens and emergency shelters,” said Stephen Gaetz, director of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness at York University. “But hand in hand with that is the use of law enforcement.”
The provincial government’s recent pledge to end homelessness by 2025 and its new focus on prevention and “housing first” policies to move people from the streets into permanent homes, is a step in the right direction, he said.
“I just hope they come around to not only repealing the Safe Streets Act, but to encouraging police forces to work with service providers to find other alternatives, rather than using enforcement to try to move people on, to get them out of the public view,” he said.
But former attorney-general Michael Bryant, who held a Queen’s Park news conference in December 2014 to highlight the issue, said little progress has been made on decriminalizing homelessness.
“At this time, our government is not planning to repeal the Safe Streets Act,” a spokeswoman for current Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur confirmed.
According to the JAMA study, 39 per cent of street-involved children and youth globally reported poverty as the main reason they were homeless or living off the streets. Family conflict and abuse were the next most frequently reported reasons, estimated at 32 per cent and 26 per cent respectively.
In developed countries such as Canada and the United States, family conflict was the main reason children and youth ended up on the street with a prevalence of 48 per cent. Delinquency was the least frequently cited reason globally, with just 10 per cent of youth saying it was the main reason they were homeless.
The report is based on 49 studies conducted between 1990 and 2013. Street-connected children and youth were defined as those who are 24 or younger and who spend a portion, or a majority, of their time living or working on the streets. Tens to hundreds of million of children and youth globally are estimated to be living on the street, according to the report.
“The causes of youth homelessness — family conflict, abuse and poverty — often intersect,” study author Braitstein said in a telephone interview from Kenya.
“Canada has more of a social safety net than Kenya does, and in spite of that, Canada continues to be plagued by some of these issues,” she said. “Clearly we’re not really being responsive to the needs of youth and families.”