Understanding How Policy and Culture Create Oppressive Conditions for LGBTQ2S Youth in the Shelter System (original) (raw)
Related papers
Preventing, Reducing and Ending LGBTQ2S Youth Homelessness: The Need for Targeted Strategies
Social Inclusion, 2016
Gender non-conforming and sexual minority youth are overrepresented in the homeless youth population and are frequently discriminated against in shelters and youth serving organizations. This paper provides a contextual understanding of the ways that institutional and governmental policies and standards often perpetuate the social exclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and 2-Spirit (LGBTQ2S) youth, by further oppression and marginalization. Factors, including institutional erasure, homophobic and transphobic violence, and discrimination that is rarely dealt with, addressed, or even noticed by shelter workers, make it especially difficult for LGBTQ2S youth experiencing homelessness to access support services, resulting in a situation where they feel safer on the streets than in shelters and housing programs. This paper draws on data from a qualitative Critical Action Research study that investigated the experiences of a group of LGBTQ2S homeless youth and the perspe...
No Safe Place to Go-LGBTQ Youth Homelessness in Canada: Reviewing the Literature
… Journal of Family and Youth Le …, 2012
Ilona Alex Abramovich is a Doctoral Candidate with the Department of Adult Education and Community Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Alex's research focuses on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and queer (LGBTQ) youth homelessness and investigating the changes that need to be implemented in Toronto's shelter system in order for it to become safer, more accessible, and more supportive for this population of youth. Other areas of interest also include, youth culture, gender identity, and shifting traditional ways of thinking about gender and sexuality. Methodologically, Alex is interested in the use of critical ethnography, participatory research, and artsinformed researcher, including, digital storytelling and film-based methods. For more information, please visit: www.
It Takes A Village: A Comprehensive Look into Sheltering Queer Youth
Of the many hardships that LGBTQ2S youth experience, the biggest may be homelessness. Children flee their homes for many reasons, including mental health issues, discrimination, and conflicts with parents. Finding a supportive and inclusive space where they can explore their identity and feel protected can be difficult when there are few resources to meet their needs. As a large proportion of homeless youth identifies as LGBTQ2S, this thesis envisions a consolidated set of facilities and services, coupled with a center that serves and galvanizes the broader queer community. The project explores inclusivity and visibility through the design of a combination community center and emergency shelter for queer youth in the heart of Ottawa's gay village-with an ancillary component that provides permanent supportive housing. Among other questions, this thesis explores how architecture can assist in creating spaces where all feel welcomed and safe and how it might facilitate community formation.
Community Building(s): Creating Accessible Homeless Shelters for LGBT Youth
In a recent study completed by National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, of all youth who are homeless, as many as 40% of those youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT). Often, when youth disclose an LGBT identity to their families, conflict erupts at home. Homeless youth most often cite familial conflict and intolerance of their identity as the primary reason for their homelessness. Once on the streets these youth face additional challenges in accessing shelters and drop-in-centers. Most homeless shelters are inaccessible to LGBT youth because they have policies for family housing accommodations that assume heterosexual family models; are constructed with a binary separation of sleeping space based on gender, which doesn’t necessarily accommodate transgender or intersex youth; and often, mandate that participants take part in religiously oriented programing that is not always inclusive of LGBT identities.
Scholarship Review of Queer Youth Homelessness in Canada and the United States
American Review of Canadian Studies, 2018
This paper is a review of historical and social science literature on the subject of homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth. I ultimately seek to situate my future doctoral work, an oral history of queer youth homelessness in Ontario, within the scholarship surveyed here. Stories help us to understand what statistics look and feel like. This analysis takes a thematic and interdisciplinary approach that does not follow a linear, temporal understanding of events or accounts. The approach of this paper is meant to reflect the nonlinear and thematic modes of remembering that many experience when recounting their times on the street. The stories of queer youth on the street are complex and their ways of remembering these moments in time are ever-more so. But, as Sassafras Lowrey so accurately put it, "sometimes it is in the complexity that the truth is most evident".
This study documents the child welfare experiences of youth who are LGBTQ and their perspectives on how these experiences influenced their housing instability and homelessness. Youth detailed incidents of gender segregation, stigmatization, isolation, and institutionalization in child welfare systems that they linked to their gender expression and sexuality, which often intersected with being a youth of color. The youth described these incidents as contributing to multiple placements and shaping why they experienced homelessness.
Youth in Crisis: Recognizing Homelessness in the LGBTQ Community
This paper will address the importance of recognizing the large number of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning /Queer (" LGBTQ ") identifying youth who are at-risk, or less likely to transition successfully into adulthood and become financially independent. More specifically, this paper focuses on homeless LGBTQ youth. It will shed light on community centers and other groups that are advocating for LGBTQ rights, will inform readers of possible housing solutions for LGBTQ youth such as LGBTQ specialized housing, and will give an overview of programs that are aimed at ensuring that youth are safe in their own homes. I will also touch upon a few alternatives that are in the process of being created, such as LGBTQ training for foster families and host families. My main goal in this paper is to describe the importance of supporting the LGBTQ youth community, to urge organizations to complete LGBTQ 101 training to ensure their missions are LGBTQ friendly, and reveal systems that are working to keep LGBTQ youth off the streets and defend them from possible harassment, abuse, and discrimination.
Outed and outside: the lives of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness
Around 2 million youth experience homelessness each year, and LGBTQ youth are estimated to make up at least 40 percent of the population of youth experiencing homelessness in the United States, despite being about 5-8 percent of the U.S. youth population. Based upon an 18-month, multi-site ethnographic study and 50 in-depth interviews, this dissertation turns to LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness to document the youth’s views on life before experiencing homelessness as well as their current needs and challenges while navigating the streets and shelters. In this project, I foreground how gender non-conformity and its intersections with sexuality, race, and poverty are the tapestry weaving through many of the young people’s stories and how they understand their experiences of homelessness. I show how the family and other institutions (i.e., schools, child welfare systems, religious communities, and the criminal legal system) discipline, punish, and criminalize the youth’s gender non-conforming presentation and behaviors. The abuse and punishment within these institutions were often linked to the youth’s perceived pathways into homelessness later in life. Once experiencing homelessness, the gender non-conforming LGBTQ youth often faced challenges on the streets because of their ix gender presentation and behaviors, but the LGBTQ youth felt protected and accepted for their gender non-conformity within a specific LGBTQ shelter. At the same time, sexuality was a resource on the streets, but sexuality was regulated in the shelter to the point that many youth at the shelter often got suspended for violating shelter rules. This gender and sexuality paradox kept the youth in this study cycling between the streets and the shelter, but not achieving and maintaining housing stability. Ultimately, this dissertation proffers a new understanding of homelessness and how gender and sexuality shape experiences of poverty and being a poor young LGBTQ person. I contend that as homelessness is about a cultural and moral status position in society, and hence, is about the devaluation of certain lives, then LGBTQ youth homelessness is about demeaning and demoralizing certain gender non-conforming poor LGBTQ youth, especially youth of color, as unworthy and unprotected by society.
LGBTQ Youth Homelessness: Why We Need to Protect Our LGBTQ Youth
LGBT Health, 2022
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth are 120% more likely to be homeless than cisgender and heterosexual youth, yet current federal policies are insufficient and exclude LGBTQ youth. Youth homeless shelters are inadequately equipped to serve LGBTQ homeless youth due to poor funding, a focus on heterosexual or cisgender clients in their programs, and a lack of LGBTQ-friendly policies. Given the pervasiveness of this issue, public health and social policy interventions must be considered. In this perspective, the LGBTQ homeless youth epidemic is introduced and described, past policies are analyzed, and policy recommendations are made.