Safety and coping strategies of homeless youth

The author examined a corpus of 200 surveys and 50 qualitative interviews conducted with homeless youth to expand the base of knowledge about how homeless youth protected themselves on the streets and coped with trauma. In the first chapter, the author addressed how homeless youth stayed safe on the streets to reduce or avoid incidents of street-based victimization. In the second chapter, the author explored how homeless youth coped with exposure to trauma, and how they felt about seeking mental health and counseling services as one form of coping. Many studies have been conducted on victimization among homeless youth on the streets. Street-based youth were focused on issues related to survival and self-conservation in a setting where their near-constant public exposure put them at significant risk. Although much is known about the dangers of street life, our understanding as to how these young people circumvent or more safely navigate these dangers is underdeveloped. The first chapter addressed a critical omission in the literature on homeless youth, by more deeply examining how these young people stayed safe in situations of heightened danger, and with truncated supports for safety. This study also explored the complexities of coping with trauma in young people simultaneously struggling for survival. The author argued that homeless youth are highly self-reliant and self-protective, but that these strengths can insulate them from mental health and counseling services that could help them recover from trauma. Homeless youth were found to "autonomously cope" with their trauma, by coping without the assistance of agency-related or informal supports.