Youth Homelessness Quotes

Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.

That's how life works. You know it when you know it. They're nineteen and in love. Alone except for each other. Jobless and homeless, looking for something, somewhere, anywhere here. They're on a sixteen-line highway. Driving west.

You are not the load you carried for all those years, you are not the homeless heart adrift at sea, but you are the flowering youth passing through the winter to spring.....

Being a living trans person means vigilance. For a non-passing trans person, there is no safe space. It is not who we are kissing, but our very heights, our voices, and the size of our hands that catalyze hatred and violence. Forget activism; simply negotiating one’s world every day, constantly judging, adjusting, scanning one’s surroundings, and changing clothes to go from one role to another can be overwhelming. Add to that cases of family disownment, poverty, homelessness, HIV. When a recent study of transgender youth reports that half their sample had entertained thoughts of suicide, and a quarter of them had made at least one attempt, I am not surprised.

Unlike heterosexuals, LGBTQ+ youths who usually grow up without relatable role models in their own homes, are at much greater risk of mental health problems, and are several times more likely to be made homeless, a process that often damages their sense of identity.

these glaring disparities, about how those with the most access within the movement set the agenda, contribute to the skewed media portrait, and overwhelmingly fail at funneling resources to those most marginalized. My awakening pushed me to be more vocal about these issues, prompting uncomfortable but necessary conversations about the movement privileging middle- and upper-class cis gay and lesbian rights over the daily access issues plaguing low-income queer and trans youth and LGBT people of color, communities that carry interlocking identities that are not mutually exclusive, that make them all the more vulnerable to poverty, homelessness, unemployment, HIV/AIDs, hyper-criminalization, violence, and so much more.

Is our society really made safer and more just by incarcerating millions of people? Is asking the police to be the lead agency in dealing with homelessness, mental illness, school discipline, youth unemployment, immigration, youth violence, sex work, and drugs really a way to achieve a better society? Can police really be trained to perform all these tasks in a professional and uncoercive manner?

Some mental healthcare workers are aware of clients with high needs, such as dissociative disorders and personality disorders, who have histories of sexual abuse (contact offences), usually from early childhood, involving two or more adults acting together and multiple child victims (Gold et al., 1996; McClellan et al., 1995; Middleton & Butler, 1998). This has been defined as “organised abuse” (Bibby, 1996; La Fontaine, 1993). Excluded from this definition are cases where a child is sexually abused by multiple perpetrators who are unaware of one another, such as survival sex amongst homeless youths, or where abuse is limited to a single household or family and there are no extra-familial victims (La Fontaine, 1993). Organised abuse: A neglected category of sexual abuse. Journal of Mental Health, 2012; 21(5): 499–508

We must break these intertwined systems of oppression. Every time we look to the police and prisons to solve our problems, we reinforce these processes. We cannot demand that the police get rid of those “annoying” homeless people in the park or the “threatening” young people on the corner and simultaneously call for affordable housing and youth jobs, because the state is only offering the former and will deny us the latter every time. Yes, communities deserve protection from crime and even disorder, but we must always demand those without reliance on the coercion, violence, and humiliation that undergird our criminal justice system. The state may try to solve those problems through police power, but we should not encourage or reward such short-sighted, counterproductive, and unjust approaches. We should demand safety and security—but not at the hands of the police. In the end, they rarely provide either.

We cannot demand that the police get rid of those “annoying” homeless people in the park or the “threatening” young people on the corner and simultaneously call for affordable housing and youth jobs, because the state is only offering the former and will deny us the latter every time. Yes, communities deserve protection from crime and even disorder, but we must always demand those without reliance on the coercion, violence, and humiliation that undergird our criminal justice system. The state may try to solve those problems through police power, but we should not encourage or reward such short-sighted, counterproductive, and unjust approaches. We should demand safety and security—but not at the hands of the police. In the end, they rarely provide either.

LGBTQ youth are thought to make up approximately 40 percent of all homeless teens, although they represent only 3 to 5 percent of teens in general.

It is inappropriate to call child protection "care" when experiences of the system are not "care"-like for everyone. "Care" essentializes the softening of a system that has a violent colonial history of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and has continued to feed its children into pipelines of homelessness and housing instability, poverty, prison and other problematic and violent systems. It fails to acknowledge that it is a system, one of which is plagued with the overrepresentation of Indigenous and Black children and families, a system built on white colonial racist values. "Care" as a word minimizes and erases the inequitable realities children, young people, families, and communities face across, not only the province of Ontario, but across the Nation. Child Protection System.

A slick BMW 5-Series pulls right by the traffic light. As the car comes to a halt, a bunch of kids, street kids, go to work. One of them, a young boy no more than eight years old kisses the BMW emblem on the hood. The driver, drenched in apathy, doesn’t even look up. Another kid comes by the side, begging the beamer’s owner for some cash. Everybody in Tehran knows that to pay these kids is bringing Slumdog Millionaire’s silver screen to the silver smog city.

After decades of neoliberal austerity, local governments have no will or ability to pursue the kinds of ameliorative social policies that might address crime and disorder without the use of armed police; as Simon points out, government has basically abandoned poor neighborhoods to market forces, backed up by a repressive criminal justice system. That system stays in power by creating a culture of fear that it claims to be uniquely suited to address.44 As poverty deepens and housing prices rise, government support for affordable housing has evaporated, leaving in its wake a combination of homeless shelters and aggressive broken-windows-oriented policing. As mental health facilities close, police become the first responders to calls for assistance with mental health crisies. As youth are left without adequate schools, jobs, or recreational facilities, they form gangs for mutual protection or participate in the black markets of stolen goods, drugs, and sex to survive and are ruthlessly criminalized. Modern policing is largely a war on the poor that does little to make people safer or communities stronger, and even when it does, this is accomplished through the most coercive forms of state power that destroy the lives of millions

Why was my Black queer experience one of unconditional love when several others have become the standard of hate and familial violence? Although the national rate of homelessness for LGBTQIAP+ youth is near 40 percent, the rate in my family has always been 0 percent. How could one family get so right what the world has gotten so wrong? We should have been the rule. Not the exception.

The value of homelessness is that it makes you value your home.

Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless and runaway American youth, as many as 40 percent are LGBTQ, according to a 2006 report by the Task Force and the National Coalition for the Homeless. A similar study by the Williams Institute cited family rejection as the leading cause of the disproportionate number of homeless LGBT youth. These young people are kicked out of their homes or are left with no choice but to leave because they can’t be themselves.

Try to imagine that you have just turned eighteen and have been put out of your foster home. You may have amassed some savings from a part-time job and received a one-time “emancipation” grant, but you don’t have a job. You have no idea where you’ll sleep tonight, let alone next week or next month. Your belongings are packed into two plastic bags. Your family is unable to help, and may even have disappeared. Further clouding your prospects are your educational deficits and a history of trouble with the law. You read at a seventh grade level. You were held back a grade, and you have a police record.1 What kind of future would you predict for yourself? Can you cope with: • Sudden homelessness, at least temporarily, while you wander through the referral maze? • Difficulty finding a job, since you don’t have a permanent address or even the basic documents you need—like a birth certificate and a Social Security card—to fill out a job application or a W-4? • An interruption in your education, not just because of the cost, but also because of complex eligibility requirements and your inability to document your school record? • The pressure to engage in unhealthy or even illegal behaviors as a means of survival?   Whatever you are imagining as your fate, the reality is much worse for many youth who age out of foster care. Data from several studies paint a troubling picture. Within a few years of leaving foster care: • Only slightly more than half of these young people have graduated from high school, compared with 85 percent of all youth eighteen to twenty-four years old. • One-fourth have endured some period of homelessness. • Almost two-thirds have not maintained employment for a year. • Four out of ten have become parents. • Not even one in five is completely self-supporting. • One in four males and one in ten females have spent time in jail.2

You gonna leave me anything?

The government and its systems of care are indeed poor parents, and vulnerable young people must endure the consequences. That is why so many foster youths exit the child welfare system unprepared to succeed, only to suffer disproportionately high rates of adjustment problems, such as poverty, imprisonment, homelessness, pregnancy, prostitution, substance abuse and premature death. This certainly is not how a loving parent serves the best interests of the child.

Most often, those who’ve been in the well are those most likely to pull others out of the well…When Jack Canaday was twelve years old he was once in the well…Now, twenty-one years later, Jack has an opportunity to reach down and help others out of the well…

Narayan Khalsa is a youth program assistant with Ambassadors of Hope and Opportunity, a Marin-based organization that serves homeless teens and young adults. The learn more about AHO, call 381-7173. You can also go online at ahoproject.org.

Look inside the first chapter of youth homelessness and Perth crime: http://www.deepintodark.com/documents...

Turning eighteen doesn’t suddenly give young people new skills or power; it simply leaves many from the child welfare system with no home and no support system. Without that safety net, many former foster youth struggle, at great cost to themselves and society.

(an estimated 40 percent of the homeless youth population in America is LGBTQ),

Today people ask why we seem to have lost a stabilizing and orienting sense of values, why the family doesn't hold together as it used to, and why aggression and anger cannot be contained, as they creep out in vandalism, crime, and ubiquitous signs of decadence. Why can't 'these people'-meaning some other race or nationality, youth, the homeless, the emotionally unstable-live properly? we ask moralistically. A more accurate question might be: What have we done in creating this modern culture that makes it so difficult to live from deep values?

In many discussions of social visions and social policies, familiar words have often been used in new ways, to mean something very different from what those words meant before. Among the words given new and often misleading meanings are such common and simple words as “change,” “opportunity,” “violence” and “privilege.” Conversely, old meanings have been expressed by new words, as vagrants became “the homeless,” exultant young thugs became “troubled youths,” and Balkanization became “diversity

I mean, they say they've gotta change the street kids' lives. Well, that's true. But you can't take somebody from point A to point Z overnight. You can't make me a fucking suburban teenager now, after what's gone down. It'll never happen.

Dave: ''Will you ever be happy Echo?'' Echo: ''I don’t know I haven’t tried it yet.'' Dave: ''Let’s give it a shot together.'' Echo: ''Let’s spread fire instead.

Quit looking for an answer, Jim. There fuckin' ain't one. Fuck yeah, I'm still looking for God's telephone number.

I don't know why he isn't dead, maybe he's lucky. Certainly his physical self is dead. Before the streets, drugs, IV use, and hustling -medically - his body is not right. [...] So there is some will to live in him, to pass on his knowledge and good nature. It's a mystery. Dave is an inspiration to people. He is society's throw-away.

I show Dave the dummy for my book. He reads every bit of writing, looks at every picture, and asks no questions. When he's done, he wipes his hands on the book.

Frank recalled a fire from his youth: two climber gals slightly buzzed had come bombing into Camp Four around midnight and hauled him away from a dying fire, insisting that he join them in a midnight swim in the Merced River, and who could say no to that. Though it was shocking cold water and pitch black to boot, more a good idea than a comfortable reality, swimming with two naked California women in the Yosemite night. But then when they got out and staggered back to the fire, near dead from hypothermia, it had been necessary to pile on wood until it was a leaping yellow blaze and dance before it to catch every pulse of lifesaving heat. Even at the time Frank had understood that he would never see anything more beautiful. Now he sat with a bunch of red-faced homeless guys bundled in their greasy down jackets, around a fire hidden at the bottom of a trash can. The contrast with the night at Camp Four was so complete that it made him laugh. Somehow, it made the two nights part of the same thing.

He was aware of a desire at once for complete glutted oblivion and for an innocent youthful fling. “Alas,” a voice seemed to be saying also in his ear, “my poor little child, you do not feel any of these things really, only lost, only homeless.

The struggle to name anti-black sentiment and anti-queer sentiment in the early 2000s was a very isolating experience. Further, naming the way that assimilationist politics were framing the LGBTQIA movement in their fight for marriage equality over against homeless queer youth and discrimination was also part and parcel of my work of naming the ways we all capitulate to the logic of the norm, an ever-expansive fold that flattens out differences and demands that we all acquiesce to the dominant culture.

... there is a difference between reading about the end of the world and actually seeing it with your own eyes. Watching a kingdom, drunk on sugar and youth culture and hippie nostalgia and reality TV and porno dreams and Hollywood lies, shrivel up and fall apart; it's like watching Alexandria and Constantinople and Rome and Athens all crumble to ash. Rising poverty. The annual migration inland, as the unemployment and homelessness and hopelessness on the West Coast spread like poison through a society that hadn't yet recovered from the pandemic. And on top of that, the forest fires that began earlier and ended later each year, meaning that a period that had once stretched from June to September now spanned April to November. Some parts of California were now more or less uninhabitable, there were places the insurance companies refused to cover, with homeowners unable to renew their existing policies, and I knew enough to understand that once the money starts leaving a place, the people follow.