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 About 40 percent of youths reported poverty as the main reason they
were homeless, according to the report in JAMA Pediatrics. Family
conflict and abuse were also among the most commonly reported
reasons for living on the streets.
The findings should make policymakers "think hard about what they
can do about these issues," said senior author Paula Braitstein, who
is affiliated with the University of Toronto and based in Kenya.
The researchers say societies often classify homeless youths as
juvenile delinquents, which results in exclusion, criminalization
and oppression.
Until now there had been no large reviews of data on why youths end
up on the streets, they write.
Braitstein and her colleagues used data collected from 49 studies
with a total of 13,559 participants from 24 countries, including 21
developing countries. No one was older than 24.
Thirty-nine percent of participants cited poverty as their reason
for homelessness. About 32 percent reported family conflict as their
reason for being on the streets, and about 26 percent cited abuse.
When the researchers examined countries by economic status, poverty
was the main reason for youth homelessness in developing countries
and family conflict was the main reason in developed countries.
While delinquency is often blamed for youth homelessness, only 10
percent of participants said that was what caused them to be
homeless. It was the least-cited reason.
And even that 10 percent figure might be an overestimate, because
youth are more inclined to report behavioral problems than abuse as
a reason for living on the streets, said Dr. Colette Auerswald, of
University of California Berkeley–University of California San
Francisco Joint Medical Program.
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"We need to focus on having an appropriate safety net for kids who
do fall through the cracks because of poverty or abuse," said
Auerswald, who co-wrote an editorial accompanying the new study.
"The kinds of solutions that these children, adolescents and young
adults need are not adult solutions," she said. "Tailoring them for
a mini-me or smaller size . . . doesn’t work."
Instead, she would like to see homeless youth served in programs
offering university-style housing, where they would be looked after,
fed and not threatened with eviction.
Braitstein told Reuters Health that governments need to take
responsibility for the care of their children.
A lot of children "end up turning to the streets because they have
nowhere else to go," she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1Vrk5fz and http://bit.ly/1Vrk8rN JAMA
Pediatrics, online April 4, 2016.
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