Hey there! Welcome to my podcast. My name is Emma White, I’m a second semester freshman here at the College of Coastal Georgia and today I’ll my discussing youth homelessness as it relates to the queer community. To clarify, to be classified in the subcategory: “youth,” a person must fall between the ages of 1-18 years.
The first article I read in my research was called Providing Solutions to LGBT Homeless Youth: Lessons from Baltimore’s Youth Empowered Society. This article is composed of research that claims up to 20-40% of underaged children that run away from home are part of the LGBTQ community. This suggests that approximately 80,000 of these children are homeless from times varying from a week to years. It isn’t uncommon for homeless shelters to turn LGBTQ persons away. In fact, it’s more common for these individuals to experience various forms of violence, discrimination, attempted suicide, and often, drug use, as opposed to their heterosexual peers.
The second article I want to discuss is written by Tracey Field. Up until recently, LGBT youth were not taken into consideration when discussing Child Welfare. Child Welfare is a tool that provides a number of services designed to protect minors from violence, exploitation, abuse, and neglect. The main purpose of Field’s article is to inform readers on the statistical analysis behind the causation of homelessness among the LGBTQ community and how we should take preventative measures to ensure the safety of these children. The article also makes it very clear that children categorized as queer follow the same distribution pattern as children with certain races, ethnicities, and religions when moving into a foster home. However, LGBTQ children are not covered under Child Welfare, which makes finding them shelter significantly harder. It shouldn’t be harder for LGBT children to have access to help in comparison to heterosexual individuals.
The final article I want to discuss focuses on the steady rise of LGBTQ homelessness and the preventative actions the government has taken to attempt to lower this statistic. The Runaway and Homeless Youth Act is one of the alternative measures the government is taking to keep children off the streets. The Runaway and Homeless Youth Act authorizes runaway and homeless youth projects to provide temporary shelter and care to runaway or otherwise homeless youth who are in need of temporary shelter, counseling, and aftercare services. The goal of this article is to help emphasize the challenges faced by youth who categorize themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ), particularly those who are homeless.
In conclusion, it is in everyone's best interest to make access to shelters and government aid more easily accessible. It’s important to have conversation about social injustices, much like this one, to broaden perspectives and allow room for change. Discussing the things that many see as “small” can play a large role in changing and influencing stereotypes and generalizations about a certain group.
I’m Emma White and thank you for listening to my podcast.