Teens leave home or are kicked out for a variety of reasons, leaving many of them staying with friends or living on the street and in dangerous situations.
A new UCLA program seeks to reunite these teenagers with their families while also studying the best way to decrease teenage homelessness.
In association with the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, Project Strive attempts, through counseling, to mend broken fences between parents and children while removing teenagers from life on the streets. While away from home, teenagers can encounter dangerous situations and engage in behavior such as drug use and unsafe sex that can put them at high risk for HIV, said Francisco Javier Iribarren, the project director for Project Strive.
Project Strive, which stands for Support To Reunite, Involve, and Value Each Other, tries to intervene between teens and their families before they become “chronically homeless,” a term for people who endlessly repeat the cycle of living in shelters and on the streets. These are people who tend to engage more in behavior that would put them at risk for HIV and unplanned pregnancy.
One such behavior is referred to as “survival sex,” when a homeless person has sex with someone in exchange for basic things like food or shelter.
Iribarren said it is most important to interrupt the revolving door of family conflict and intermittent homelessness when the teenagers are newly homeless.
“The vast majority go back home, but because the family dynamics are full of conflict, they leave again. Each time they leave, they stay on the streets longer. We want to break that cycle,” he said.
Project Strive works with families through a series of five family counseling sessions.
“We teach the families to manage feelings, to successfully deal with conflict by finding mutual agreeable solutions, trying different roles. We steer away from blame. We stress that family problems can only be solved through interactions,” Iribarren said.
A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that between 21 and 40 percent of runaways and homeless teenagers had been sexually abused, compared to 1 to 3 percent of the general population in the same age group.
Unplanned pregnancy numbers also soar among the homeless community.
Among homeless teenagers, 94 percent have had sex, and 32 percent have been pregnant; 14 percent of homeless girls between 13 and 15 have been or are pregnant, as opposed to 1 percent among girls of the same age who are not homeless.
According to a study of homeless youth in Houston, the HIV/AIDS rate is about 13 percent.
According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, 1.35 million children nationwide are homeless at any given time.
Many area homeless shelters and missions do not have specific programs in place for homeless youth or their families.
Reverend Tina Babcock, who is in charge of the women’s program at the Los Angeles Mission, said the program does not generally accept homeless youth because of the potentially dangerous reactions from the adult homeless.
“We personally don’t service homeless teens,” she said. “The mission was originally established to assist men, and that population tends to have criminal histories, which includes children. We are cautious about mixing those populations.”
Cynthia Barrios, a case manager at the Los Angeles House of Ruth, said the center receives many teenagers asking for help, but that they are a difficult group to work with because of the legal implications.
“We get about 20 calls per day from teens,” Barrios said. “If they aren’t legally emancipated, we put them in a sort of residential home. They’re not on their own like they would be in our shelter.”
Iribarren noted that Project Strive is also meant as a way to study the best way to help families reunite ““ half of the families that the project reunites are given skill-building sessions. The other half of the families are reunified and then sent home without further counseling.
There is follow-up from Project Strive later to see if they are able to resolve the problems on their own. Project Strive has recruited approximately 50 homeless teens and their families to try and stop the cycle of sexual abuse, violence and drug use. Their ultimate goal for the experiment is to test their cognitive-behavior and family-skills theories with 320 Southern California families.