Eva's Initiatives for Homeless Youth is an award-winning Toronto-based organization to provide shelter and transitional housing for young people ages 16 to 24 who are experiencing homelessness. Our hope is to help them reach their potential and lead productive lives.
Eva's Place is a 40-bed emergency shelter and the home of the family reconnect program. Eva's Satellite is a 33-bed emergency shelter that focuses on harm reduction for youth who are substance users and are dealing with mental health issues. Eva's Phoenix is townhouse-style supportive housing for 50 young people. It provides educational and employment programs as well.
Charity Intelligence selected Eva's as one of Canada's top 10 impact charities. Eva's serves homeless young people of all genders. They become homeless for many reasons. However, it is clear that young people face systemic difficulties when impacted by violence against women and intimate partner violence; they seek supports from youth-servicing shelters and transitional housing providers that are ill-equipped to help them.
There are a couple of research points that I want to highlight that show the intersectionality between homelessness and gender-based violence.
The first one is that evidence shows that the majority of young people experiencing homelessness come from homes with high levels of physical, sexual and emotional abuse; interpersonal violence and assault; parental neglect; and exposure to intimate-partner violence. The lack of safety in the streets may cause young women to stay in living situations where they are at risk of gendered violence as well. Young men typically outnumber females in youth-serving shelters. It's a two-to-one ratio, more or less.
Evidence supports the view that many young women stay in violent situations because the streets feel much more unsafe. Homelessness exposes young people to extremely high risks of violence. They are nearly six times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population, and they are targeted more than anyone else for all kinds of violent crime, including sexual assaults.
LGBTQ and two-spirited youth, indigenous youth and youth who become homeless at a younger age are at the highest risk for violence. Homeless young people are especially vulnerable for being trafficked as well.
Covenant House Youth, the Field Center for Children's Policy, Practice and Research and the Loyola University Modern Slavery Research Project of 2017 found that 68% of youth who had either been trafficked or had engaged in survival or commercial sex had done so while homeless.
Other information they found about high risk was that one in five of all cisgender women experienced a situation considered to be sex trafficking. LGBTQ youth accounted for 36% of the sex trafficking victims. Youth with a history of involvement in the foster system accounted for 27% of all youth engaged in the sex trade and 26% of all youth who were labour trafficked.
The Canadian Women's Foundation, in 2014, noted five factors for experiencing sex trafficking: being female and young, being poor, having a history of violence or neglect, having a history of sexual abuse, and having low levels of education. Other risk factors included the lack of local employment opportunities, being migrants or new immigrants and/or having low levels of social supports, being indigenous, being homeless, living in care or group homes or foster care, being involved in substance use or mental health issues, and having a history of criminal justice system involvement and gang association.
Youth shelters and transitional housing need support to increase capacity. In general, federal funding programming toward youth-serving shelters and transitional housing is very low. In Eva's case, we receive very few direct federal supports, even though we are one of the largest youth-serving shelters and transitional housing providers in Canada.
Young people escaping gender-based violence come to Eva's on a regular basis. These include those who face this violence themselves or are exposed to it at home. Adult women's shelters may be unavailable to them because of their age, because they are unaccompanied by a parent or a guardian, or because they don't know that they can access them. As well, in our experience when we have tried to access those beds, there is no space for them, even in Toronto where there are a lot more resources.
Even though young people come to service providers like Eva's, we do not often qualify for funds for gender-based violence alleviation, federal or otherwise. This presents a serious barrier to young women in particular, because it means we cannot reserve a shelter or transitional housing space, and most days or nights we cannot find them support from Eva's, because we are at capacity.
We're not certain about the hidden figures of young people who stay in situations of gender-based violence for fear of the streets. However, approximately 2,000 youths are homeless in Toronto each night, of which 600 are found in shelters or transitional houses and 123 are at Eva's. We know this means that young women may require youth shelters and transitional housing beds to escape gender-based violence but cannot access them.
Shelters are often the last place funders consider for meaningful programs, yet it is in the shelters and with the staff there that many young people disclose experiences of violence and trauma and reach out for support.
In the shelter we witness what so many young people need in terms of what we call “life skills”, but it's so much more than that. In our shelters, we meet young people where they're at, and slowly, ever so slowly, they begin to open up about years of violence, and we often have to transfer them to someone else in the community for support. When we do so, we often shut down that very young person, leading them back into the old patterns of shame, fear, isolation and denial.
For us doing this work, it is more than clear that places like Eva's and other youth and housing providers need government funding, not only to provide spaces to assist young women but also to maintain teams that have the experience, skills and sensitivity to support those young women escaping gender-based violence.
Thank you.