Save Our Homeless Children, Save Our Society

by Tony Chavira

Homelessness will always be part of our country. No matter what services you provide, there will be someone out there who doesn’t want them, likely someone with a psychological condition that affects their socialization. Over the past few years our government’s put real time and resources into trying to find some sort of transitional housing for homeless families, including a large chunk of funds from the stimulus package. But the problem is not the money; it’s the way we spend it. Although a sudden explosion in the emergency and transitional housing provided the recently homeless with a place to stay during the downturn, homelessness didn’t go away. In fact, the number of permanently homeless didn’t change much.

But why?

It’s great to provide emergency and transitional housing; the American people need social safety nets for catastrophes like a global economic meltdown. But they don’t solve the core problem: that these people can’t afford a normal home at the market price. This is why bungalows meant to help people for six months turn into places families live in for years: good intentions aside, sheltering the homeless never ends up housing the homeless. That is why the stimulus failed: it didn’t think far enough ahead. When 16% of people who leave transitional housing stay homeless while only 28% move on to permanent housing without some sort of government subsidy, you can’t say we have a stellar success rate.

Think about the emotional toll being homeless has on a family that’s trying to stay afloat. The parents don’t know what to do or where to turn; children are thrown into a world of chaos and confusion. And families who go homeless once tend to do it again. This gets young children comfortable with the idea of being homeless and hopeless. Between five and seven percent of teenagers are homeless, between 1 and 1.5 million kids. That’s one in every 20 high school kids. Homeless. How do they keep up their grades? Where do they do their homework? How can they go to college?

Or do those questions even matter to them? Rather than living their lives as typical teenagers with typical teenage worries, homeless teenagers worry about risk: risk of sexual exploitation, physical abuse, chemical or alcohol dependency, mental health disabilities and death. Homeless kids repeat a grade at twice the rate of their peers and are twice as likely to be suspended from school. And since homeless kids also have twice the rate of learning disabilities, but usually can’t maintain a consistent school schedule, they don’t get the amount of special education they need to catch up. So they get permanently left behind. Until they just drop out.

Jacob Riis photograph

There’s even a difference in health conditions between very poor housed and homeless children. There’s an increased incidence of asthma and upper respiratory infections, skin ailments, gastrointestinal problems, parasites, chronic physical disorders, developmental delays, high levels of anxiety, depression and behavior problems, contributing to lower attendance and poor performance. The longer a kid stays homeless, the worse these effects become; most perilously, their socio-psychological problems. The more anxious, depressed, antisocial, or psychologically disrupted these children become, the harder it becomes to bring them back into society. Their chances of feeling normal, safe and productive spirals out of their grasp and their fundamental ability to develop normal relationships and routines vanishes.

This is how the mentally and emotionally unstable population on the streets came to be there. As children. Stress and trauma are everyday occurrences in their lives. Being homeless means a constantly violent environment. Being homeless means witnessing ruthless acts of physical and sexual abuse. Being homeless means that these acts of violence are often perpetrated on you.

A five city study on violent attacks against women revealed that children were present at three out of four of the households when the police arrived. The majority of the women were low-income and single. How is a child supposed to take in abuse like this without being affected by it? Witnessing violence can be as upsetting as actually being hit. Worse, it teaches children that violence is normal from an early age ... an answer to a question, a response to the sense that they are losing control over a situation. Thus begins the spiral of depression, hypertension, anxiety, fear and inhibition, aggressive outbursts and antisocial behavior. Violence becomes accepted and common. It becomes normal.

Not surprisingly, homeless teenagers have reported a higher degree of parental neglect and much greater exposure to physical and sexual abuse than teenagers living in homes (even low-income ones). In a Seattle study of 328 homeless and runaway kids between the ages of 13 and 21, 82% reported physical abuse, 43% reported family neglect, and 26% reported sexual abuse. That’s more than one in four kids experiencing sexual abuse and ending up on the streets. A scarier study of 414 homeless 16 to 20 years olds in Austin revealed that over half reported sexual abuse in their past. In an even scarier study, of 775 street kids between 12 to 19 in Denver, New York, and San Francisco, 70% of girls and 24% of boys were sexually abused, and 35% of all respondents were physically abused. All these reports were completed within the last seven years.

I can throw statistics at you for days, and you can feel horrible about them and think about how glad you are that you weren’t raised that way. Or wonder which six of your 300 Facebook friends might’ve spent some of their youth homeless, and how it psychologically affected them. Or look at the crazy homeless guy on the street downtown and wonder about his horrific past, the past you wish you could erase for him. There’s so much you’d want to do: give him a new life, help him move forward, help him see that life is amazing and worth living and a gift. But he doesn’t and can’t see the world that way. Our society turns homeless people into undetectable urban sculpture: something you just accept as a part of your city.

We can’t do this anymore, not in good conscience. There are quantifiable steps, like permanent low-cost housing, that can be taken right now to save a generation of homeless children and prevent generations of homeless adults. We know which resources need to be cheaper; we know how properly subsidize things like food and water to keep low-income people from freefalling into homelessness. We know that our educational system has one homeless child in every 20, and we need to accommodate that child. We know solutions exist. We just need to take appropriate action.

Otherwise, traumatized, abused children will become homeless children; highly anxious, depressed homeless children will become antisocial, violent, hyper-tense homeless teenagers; and antisocial, violent, hyper-tense homeless teenagers will become the crazy homeless guy on the street downtown.

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