COH-AWH-What_Would_it_Take

1.6 ADVERSE CHILDHOOD
EXPERIENCES
Research has shown that young people experiencing
homelessness often face significant adversity prior
to becoming homeless, such as childhood abuse
and neglect. These traumas are often referred to
as “adverse childhood experiences”(ACEs), and
have been shown to be a key social determinant of
health. Ten key types of ACEs have been identified
in research literatures as impacting children’s
development and physical, social, mental, emotional,
and behavioural health and well-being (including
physical abuse, sexual abuse, household substance
abuse, and household mental illness).
In consultations with youth across the country, it was
evident that many young people experienced more
than one of these forms of adversity in their childhood
and adolescence. In many cases youth described
these experiences as occurring over many years,
and as repeated throughout their lives. As discussed
below, this adversity sometimes continued in public
systems (e.g., physical abuse in foster care, violent
victimization in the emergency shelter system).
Importantly, youth identified that professionals
in various systems (e.g., teachers, social workers,
“I wasn’t aware of how bad it
was at home, and there was also
that guilt that like, oh, it was my
problem, I can’t leave home, I can’t
become homeless. So, I’d be like,
‘No, no, no, it’s fine, I can work it
out.’ But I think you can bypass
that sort of instinctual sort of, ‘Oh,
it’s not that bad’ if you’re able to
tell the kid, ‘Well, listen, let’s put
you on the waiting list for three
months or so, and in three months,
we’ll revisit it. If you’re still not in a
good place, I can take you off it or
we can go ahead with it.’ Because
I think for a lot of kids, there’s a
manipulation of abuse there, where
we would be … like, bad, if they
were say, ‘Oh, it IS bad at home.’”
EDMONTON YOUTH
frontline staff at emergency shelters) sometimes made the effects of these ACE’s worse by
ignoring or discounting their experiences, blaming or stigmatizing them, or excluding them from
supports or benefits that would have helped them deal with these challenges.
In some cases this adversity was occurring not just within the home or a public system, it was
occurring within a youth’s community as well (e.g., gang violence, police profiling of poor youth).
Youth discussed the severe effects of these experiences on their mental health and well-being,
and the difficult choices they were forced to make when trying to escape violence, neglect, and
family conflict. Youth’s options for dealing with adversity were often severely constrained by other
structural factors that increased their risk of homelessness, such as lack of housing and poverty.
WHAT WOULD IT TAKE? 62