homeless teens

Elizabeth — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 07:24:53 -0800

Thanks Gracie! That sounds like an interesting study and when it's finally posted on the sciencedirect.com site I'd love to read the whole thing. The problems facing homeless teens need to be taken seriously and it's great that researchers are paying careful attention to them. (I'd especially love to see legislation like the proposed but still unpassed Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth ac-- an imperfect act, as I wrote here, but a better start to be sure than continuing to criminalize teens attempts at survival.)

Meanwhile I'd encourage a word of caution about interpreting the results of this study to indicate that parental involvement is best.

In the case of runaways it is important to acknowledge that the parents may be a big part of the problem, indeed part of why the kid has run away. I'm wondering if "family situation" as used in the study means crashing with an older sibling, an aunt or uncle, or a grandparent.

Also, even based on the summary linked above, it appears that a large majority (more than 3/4ths) of the study participants were sexually active before becoming homeless. Their additional risky behavior is characterized this way: "Males were found to be more likely to have multiple sex partners if they lived in settings without family members and abused drugs. For females, drug abuse was the primary predictor of risky sexual behavior." So it seems like drug use was more influential than the presence of family members for girls, and at least very important for boys in combination with the absence of family members."The summary goes on to say that neither drug use nor family were predictors of condom use in boys, leaving one to wonder what did predict condom use in boys.)

Lets keep an eye on this study and see what it says when the full text is released. (When it is, it will be available here.) One of my goals for this site has been to develop a pool of folks who can comment on recently-released sex research, because so often that research gets accepted by the mainstream media at face value without much critique.

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homeless teens