The Beat

More African American children than white children are born into poverty in the United States. That difference at birth leads to inequalities throughout a child’s life, according to “Portrait of Inequality 2012: Black Children in America.” Published by the Children’s Defense Fund, a child advocacy nonprofit in Washington, the report compares how African American and white children fare when it comes to childhood poverty, family stability, health, school readiness, education, employment and other factors.

To learn how youth workers can think about and address the disparities African American youth face, we spoke to MaryLee Allen, who directs the fund’s child welfare and mental health policy and advocacy.

NCFY: Is there a relationship between the inequalities detailed in your report and youth homelessness?

Allen: Clearly there’s a relationship between the inequities in the report and the challenges facing youth later in life, of which homelessness is certainly one of them. Children are born with certain challenges and the odds they have to overcome increase over time. As you look at it, as children move on in life, many of the challenges they face can be attributed to the effects of poverty. Not only are black children three and a half times as likely as white children to live in extreme poverty, but also more than two-thirds of black children who are born poor will remain poor for at least half their childhood.

Poverty stacks the odds against children throughout their life—whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s early childhood, whether it’s education, whether it’s dropping out of school, unemployment. Those problems, which all contribute to homelessness, continue to grow. In each of those areas black children and black families are far behind white families.

Youth end up homeless too often when they’ve fallen behind in school and dropped out of school. One of the most striking data in “Portrait of Inequality” is that more than 80 percent of black public school students can’t read or do math at grade level in 4^th and 8^th grade. So the likelihood that they are going to end up dropping out or being pushed out is very significant.

I would make the same connection when it comes to teen pregnancy. Poor performance is related to their chance of dropping out and their increased likelihood of becoming pregnant as a teenager.

NCFY: What should youth workers do with the information in the report?

Allen: There’s several things: Knowing the data, but also keeping faces on the numbers is an extremely important thing to do. We hope they will—and we know many do—join with others to work to eliminate child poverty but also to make sure that we invest in early childhood, development, education, health,  and specialized treatment that all children need. My experience has been that youth workers and the young people they serve better than anyone can make policymakers and other interested citizens understand the odds children are facing but also convey the opportunities there are to overcome the odds and give every child that high school diploma, college degree and job that they need.

At a recent community symposium on the commercial sexual exploitation of young people in Dallas, the audience witnessed an unrehearsed demonstration of just how far the city has come in its approach to combating trafficking.

A police detective explained that he and his colleagues no longer detain girls and charge them with prostitution. Today, police treat the girls as victims, taking them to shelters where they can get social services that prepare them for a different life.

It turned out he had once, back before the change in philosophy, arrested one of the young women who shared the panel stage with him.

“Just a few years ago the girls and the Dallas police were at odds,” says Katie Pedigo, executive director of New Friends New Life, a program that helps Dallas women leave the sex industry. “Now we all work together. They literally sit side by side, fighting for this cause.”

Pedigo credits the police department for creating the High Risk Victims Unit about a decade ago. By adding a unit that specializes in helping trafficked young people, she says, the police underlined their seriousness in addressing the issue. They also created a “home base” for the trafficking issue, Pedigo says, helping to coordinate the work of the justice system, youth shelters and advocates for trafficked people.

Here’s how it works: When an officer in the High Risk Victims Unit finds young women who have been trafficked, they take the victims directly to the Letot Center, a Dallas County shelter for youth at risk of getting in trouble with the law. Bonnie Buccigrossi, who helps oversee young women’s entry to the center, and her colleagues admit the youth. The officer alerts Pedigo and her staff, who make their way over and begin providing therapy and other services that will enable the young women to exit “the life” of sexual trafficking.

The High Risk Victims Unit communicates regularly with every Dallas-area agency that works with trafficked people, serving as an information hub while taking the lead on criminal aspects of cases, including prosecuting pimps. The police also help find and communicate with victims’ families, especially if they happen to be out of the area.

With the family and criminal aspects of the case in police hands from the get-go, Buccigrossi says her staff can tend to the immediate needs of the girls who come to their shelter.

“It helps us because we can focus on the girl,” she says, “and it helps the police because they know the girl is in a safe place with people who know this population. And it helps families of the victims, because they know everything is being taken care of.”

Changing the Conversation

Pedigo offered some advice about how to begin collaborating with police on this issue:

Ask  how you can help. Pedigo says police will respond more positively if you say, “We don’t want to hinder or contradict your practices. We want to be a resource for you.” That attitude allows for expertise to flow both ways, and everyone feels their own workload is being lightened, not added to. So make a presentation to the sergeant in charge of youth issues, and explain the effects of trafficking on the community. Then discuss how your agency can help the police address it.

Meet with community leaders. Local and county legislators and councilmembers also interact with the police, and can insist on setting certain priorities. “If it’s an issue for their constituents, local leaders will start paying attention,” Pedigo says.

Stay in touch. Letot Center administrators meet with members of the High Risk Victims Unit and the district attorney’s office about once a month. The conversations keep the youth workers aware of the street-level fight against trafficking and enable the police to follow the ongoing recovery of the girls they help. 

Certified yoga instructor Casadi Marino teaches others how to achieve yoga's benefts, but her expertise extends beyond the mat. Working at the Regional Research Institute for Human Services, she has studied the effects of yoga on mental health. Now a doctoral student at Portland State University’s School of Social Work, Marino has also seen yoga’s impact on her own life as she maintains her recovery from bipolar disorder and substance abuse.

Earlier this year, we read Marino’s article called “Yoga for Youth in Trauma Recovery” (PDF, 391KB). In it, she reviews the literature on how yoga affects youth with histories of trauma. We know many youth-serving programs use a variety of approaches to help young people deal with past trauma, so we spoke with Marino about the benefits of yoga and steps youth workers can take to help youth heal both emotionally and physically.

NCFY: How does yoga help youth feel safe?

MARINO: When people have been traumatized, they become fairly alienated, not just with others and with society, but with themselves.

Yoga really helps people to reattach to their bodies, helps them to own what’s going on with themselves physically while at the same time not totally identifying with it. So it’s their body, it’s their experience, but it’s not who they are.

NCFY: How can you tell if yoga is making a difference?

MARINO: You can see that people are actually breathing; they’re breathing more deeply. You can see how they hold themselves. They’re not always hyper-alert so they can let go of some of that hyper-vigilance. They might actually be able to receive a social touch without being reactive. They’re not always looking behind them.

NCFY: How can youth workers help young adults whose lives are unstable engage in regular yoga practice?

MARINO: When people are busy surviving, it’s harder to heal if you’re still being wounded. However, it never hurts to breathe, and you can sneak yoga in in little ways.  

If you’re washing up in a restroom that you find that you can take a little sink bath in and you do tree [pose], then you’ve done something really good for yourself.

NCFY: You also recommend that youth visit trauma-informed yoga classes to learn from properly trained instructors. Can other yoga classes be customized to aid youth recovery?

MARINO: There are some schools of yoga, Vinyasa for instance, that are much more flexible in terms of how somebody does yoga. But it does come down to the individual teacher so it’s important to talk to the individual teacher, tell them your expectations, make your requests very clear and perhaps even write them down and keep them in front of your yoga mat. “I do not wish to have an adjustment. I wish to have permission ahead of time to come out of a pose and just hang out in child’s pose if I’m just getting too activated.” So, it’s definitely possible, but I would just urge people to go slowly.

More From NCFY

A little while back, we wrote about the nonprofit organization Street Yoga, which uses a trauma-informed approach to yoga to help youth, families and caregivers struggling with homelessness and addiction.

For the last few years, Eric Rice has been studying the largely positive aspects of social networking for at-risk and runaway youth. In interviews with dozens of homeless youth in the Los Angeles area, he has found that tools like cell phones and Facebook can keep runaway young people connected to their peers and family members back home. 

We know youth workers are always looking for ways to link youth to friends and families, when doing so is safe and makes sense for the young person. So we recently asked Rice, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California's School of Social Work, to further explain the implications and scope of his findings about social media and runaway youth.

NCFY: How has social media changed the experience of being a homeless or runaway youth?

RICE: Social media and cell phones have really changed the kinds of interactions that runaway and homeless youth can have. Prior to those technologies, youth would leave home and basically their connections were limited to other street youth or to really overworked program staff—social workers, case managers and volunteers. They had few social connections, and most of them involved other high-risk youth who don’t have a lot of resources to get out of street life.

Once social media like Facebook or MySpace became more prevalent at drop-in agencies and libraries, it provided an opportunity for homeless young people to connect with people outside of street life, particularly friends from home with stable lives, and family members they still had good relations with.

NCFY: And what benefits do those relationships have for runaway youth?

RICE: There are two important implications of these relationships. First, they provide street youth with resources around housing and employment that they probably wouldn’t have otherwise. And secondly, they can observe a set of behaviors that isn’t quite so desperate as those around them.

Take our study of runaway and homeless youth substance abuse, for example. We found that when they stay connected to family or home-based peers who weren’t users, homeless young people were less likely to report substance abuse. Whereas the ones who were primarily connecting face-to-face with street peers were much more likely to use.

We’ve found this same result across a whole host of outcomes. In terms of mental health, youth with more connections to street peers report more depression and anxiety. Young people connected to sexual risk-taking peers on the street were more likely to exhibit those behaviors themselves.

NCFY: So what can youth workers take from this?

RICE: We created a policy paper in collaboration with youth workers, and we gave four major recommendations:

One: Try to provide more computer and Internet access in your youth program. Most runaway and homeless youth are dependent on public libraries for access. They need help getting online to maximize the positive benefits of social media.

Two: Encourage computer use for normal adolescent social media use in addition to more traditional things like job searches or finding long-term shelter. Recognize that these have positive benefits.

Three: Bookmark some useful pages on your agency’s computers. Youth don’t always know how to find credible sources. So make it easy for youth to access youth-friendly sites on substance abuse treatment or HIV awareness, for example.

Four: Monitor young people’s computer use with harm reduction in mind. In addition to positive relationships, young people can also use social media to connect to harmful relationships [such as] drug dealers or sexual partners. Low-key monitoring can help staff reduce these risks.

While our research is limited to a largely African-American male adolescent population in Los Angeles, I have colleagues that have done similar work with other populations in San Antonio, Colorado and New York. We can see that this is not an L.A. or male phenomenon so much as a youth phenomenon. It’s part of their daily life.

I don’t think technology is a silver bullet for youth homelessness. But looking at the way it connects youth to resources and positive networks, it can be something that enhances the lives of these young people.

More From NCFY

"Research Roundup: Online Social Networks May Protect Homeless Youth From Negative Influences"

"Staying Safe Online"

"Using Technology in Family and Youth Work"