No Place Like Home: Final Research Report on the Pridehouse Project
Submitted to Human Resources Development Canada & The PrideCare Society
October 31, 2002
 
Suzanne de Castell, principal investigator & Jennifer Jenson, collaborator
Assisted by Francisco Ibanez and Loree Lawrence, senior research associates, and research assistants Darcie Bennett, Justin Jagosh, Sacha Fink, P.J. Simon, Jax Guillion, Michael Wright, Michelle Reed, Claudia Ruitenberg, Trish Salah and Nick Taylor.
 
This project was made possible through the support of the Government of Canada, Human Resources Development Canada, and by the Status of Women Canada, whose strong support of the video-based component of the research greatly expanded our access to research tools. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Government of Canada. We are grateful also to A.M.E.S., Save the Children Canada, Youthco, the LGBT counselors who volunteered their help, Covenant House staff, The Gathering Place, The Center, the Downtown Eastside Women’s Center, Justice for Girls, and above all to the many people who gave their time and effort to informing this study about the ‘lived actualities’ that connect sexuality, poverty and exploitation to youth homelessness.

Background and Goals of the Study

The purpose of the Pridehouse Study was to identify the needs of street-involved “queer and questioning” youth (1) for housing and support. The study was solicited and sponsored by the Pride Care Society, and supported by Human Resources Development Canada. Partners and collaborators in this study included: Save the Children Canada, a child-centred development agency whose aim is to assist, enable and empower children, families and communities; The McCreary Center Society, an organization focusing on research and action concerned with the health of BC youth; Status of Women Canada whose mandate is to promote gender equity; and The Access to Media Education Society (AMES), a registered non-profit society dedicated to helping people cultivate individual, group and mass communications skills that will enable them to express themselves through the media arts.

Assisted and informed by these organizations, the research project described here is a short term, ethnographically based study of conditions and needs of youth at the intersection of economic conditions, sexuality, and housing needs (2) . It was initiated as a grounding for fundraising work to create designated housing for street-involved LGBT youth who find themselves on the fringes of, or unable to “fit in” to, existing institutions and structures of support (3). Its initial premise was that, among Canadian street-involved youth at risk of illness, homelessness, violence, and suicide are children and youth whose sexuality, whether self-asserted as “queer” or so assigned by others, renders them more likely than their peers to ‘fall through the cracks’ of existing service provision. Such youth are far more likely than their peers to experience bullying and violence at school and to “drop out” of school prematurely, to suffer bodily and sexual violence, to be alienated from family members, to be “kicked out” of their family homes and to migrate to street-based survival.

The initial goals of the project, accordingly, were defined as follows:
  1. to determine the distinctive and particular risks to, and therefore the distinctive and particular needs for, housing, supports and services, of homeless/inadequately housed “queer and questioning” LGBT youth who are, or who are at risk of becoming, street-involved;
  2. to describe and document these needs in an extensive and comprehensive report including both textual and visual documents;
  3. to contribute informational resources which can be used as a basis for seeking further funding to establish safe and supportive housing for this at-risk population;
  4. to contribute to the shaping and informing of policy which better acknowledges and meets the needs of youth who too often “fall through the gaps” of existing social policy;
  5. to provide information, resources and materials useful for the purpose of public education to prevent or reduce the kinds of social harms (bullying, discrimination, parental rejection) which induce youth to leave their homes prematurely;
  6. to effect capacity-building and networking through participant-researcher training and community-university collaboration, providing youth with skills-training, work experience, and paid employment as community-based researchers.

The primary intended outcome for this research was to better inform a community-based housing development organization about the conditions, needs, and expressed desires of the specific population for whom they sought to improve existing housing support. The research has been guided by this question:


What are the particular needs experienced by “queer and questioning” youth with respect to safe and supportive housing, and what are the ‘gaps’ in existing social policy and service provision which place this group at particular risk (4) of homelessness?
What we did
Being queer has never been much of a status symbol, and for most of us, there are real dangers associated with making it public that one’s sexuality diverges from the mainstream. 

“I would never wish a gay life on anybody” (Bob)
So this study of the conditions and needs of youth who are “queer or questioning” presumed that little information could be accessed about the impacts of a stigmatized identity, unless the researchers themselves were already so “marked”. We created a diverse team of researchers, all of whom self-identified as “queer or questioning”. Half were university graduate students, and half community-based “experiential” youth knowledgeable about street survival. An initial researcher training week gave intensive training in ethnographic research methods, and researcher training was supported by weekly “team-building” meetings where the week’s fieldwork was discussed, new skills were workshopped, discussions about problems and priorities took place, and the next week’s work was mapped out. It was at these weekly meetings that the survey was developed, videowork was viewed, and routine administrative issues were covered—this was the one time each week when the entire team assembled to work together. The remainder of the time, the researchers worked, normally in pairs, making site observations and recoding these in fieldnotes and images, conducting interviews and focus groups, designing, then administering a survey, conducting video-based research, and further developing their post-production video skills by creating a research-based video, “Building a house for pride” (August, 2002). These research methods yielded both qualitative and quantitative data to develop a richer, clearer and better-informed picture of the conditions and needs of street-involved sexual minority youth.  

This report is organized and presented as the story of a community-oriented, peer-based research project rather than as a narration of facts about sexuality, youth and housing. Accordingly, each section takes up a different dimension of the research and shows what each component contributes to the study as a whole. This produces a stylistic hybrid: an unusual but hopefully also informative and eloquent mix of ethnographic, grounded, multiply-informed exposition which fuses both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Interspersed throughout the analytical discussions, observations and interpretations of the principal investigator’s text are the voices of researchers and participants, graphs and charts, lists, pictures, drawings, fieldnotes and reflective analytical notes written, often as critical ‘out-takes’ by research assistants commenting on their own work and the work of the project.  

 

Literature Reviews
Establishing a context
To establish the context for this research, an extensive literature review was conducted as a two-stage process. The first phase of the review (see appendix 1) was completed by SFU Ph.D. student Claudia Ruitenberg who presented the research team with a preliminary overview of the field of inquiry as part of their first week of training. The second phase was conducted at the end of the project by Trish Salah, a Ph.D. student at York University, and that review was guided by particular questions that had arisen, and omissions that had become evident, during the fieldwork phase of this study. Accordingly, Trish Salah’s review (see appendix 2) concentrated on transgender/transsexual youth- a neglected category of youth who also appeared in our own work to be in greatest need of support and services- on “grassroots” networking, and on the design, implementation and outcomes of similar projects to that planned by the PrideCare Society.  


“For a straight catholic organization, I think we do
pretty good” (Colleen, youth shelter worker)


“There are no housing services for people like me…They [the youth shelter] didn’t know what to do regarding transexuals” (Tim, transexual youth)

 
Supplementing those literature reviews, two members of the research team, Michelle Reed and Darcie Bennett, shared papers they had written which focused on this project’s central questions: the current needs, conditions and specifically the housing needs of “queer and questioning” youth. Michelle’s paper (see Appendix 3) on street involvement “risk factors” for gay and lesbian youth was written initially as a course paper and Darcie’s analysis (see Appendix 4) of the current political and economic conditions in BC, the impact of the recent and impending budget cuts to social services, and the impact of these policies and cuts on queer and questioning youth, was written in and for the specific context of this study.  


The Pridehouse Project has benefited greatly from, and is much indebted to, the work of these four researchers, whose contributions are available in their entirety in appendices 1-4. Highlights and excerpts from that work are presented below, following a brief, but important, note about some significant discrepancies between theoretical and field-based research on the experiences, conditions and needs of ‘queer and questioning youth’.

 
Theoretical note  

What soon became a clear and key difference between this academic/textual work, and our own very partial and patchy, but also very much more embodied, immediate, “grounded” fieldwork, is the relative ease with which sexual identity categories like “gay and lesbian”, “heterosexual” and “queer” are used in research reports, compared with how problematic and contested/contestable these categories were when we tried to “map” them onto real bodies. A second striking difference is in the way “identity development” is often portrayed and reported on. Typical textual representations and models of queer identity development are very much of an embryonic, painfully emerging sexuality, whose specific “stages” of emergence map on to both epistemic ‘stages” (awareness, denial, acceptance, and so on), and particular perils (isolation, stigma, abuse, suicide, etc). We really don’t see much of this determinateness of identity, nor its “stage-like” emergence, in our own fieldwork. Instead, sexual identification/s and sexual practice/s appear created far more by the economics of survival than determined by desire. It seems to be more outsiders who traverse these so-called stages of identity development, which they then (as attribution theory might suggest) attribute to the “socially problematic”.

 
“I always knew I was into women, but I hid that part for a long time, cause I just didn’t want to deal with the backlash of it.” (Kitty Kat, Interview)

In our interviews, we heard accounts that suggested that youth themselves fairly rapidly comprehended their own sexuality, including its contextual variability and uncertainty. By contrast, they describe as hazy, conflictual, and stage-like the process that others in their lives have undergone in “dealing” with interviewees’ sexual a-typicality.


“At 14 my father asked, “David are you gay?”
“You don’t really need to ask, Dad”
(David, Interview)

 
We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that while much academic work makes identity categorization a recognizably patterned “developmental” process, identity as it is lived for queer children and youth, contending with unheeding, disbelieving and often condemnatory others, is rarely a simple matter of accepting “what” one is, so long as one is perennially held hostage to what one is ALLOWED to be/come.


“If my father found out I was bisexual, he would probably disown me, treat me like shit. I would not be his child anymore…and I wouldn’t be able to see my mother anymore which would be the hardest part.” (Tony, Interview)Literature Reviews: Key Points

 
Part 1


The first phase of the literature review, conducted by Claudia Ruitenberg, was to provide the research team with background on the conditions and needs of street-involved “queer and questioning” youth. To do that, Ruitenberg creates a model (see below) for explaining how it is that sexual minority youth become street-involved. She begins with a glossary of terms whose purpose is to make clear the conceptual complexities involved in researching the present study’s most central category (“queer and questioning youth”). She then reports on research which documents early rejection at home, lack of support and safety in “care”. Stigmatization at school, disregard/denial/discrimination on the part of service agencies and providers, she details, contribute to social isolation, damaged self-esteem, economic marginalization, vulnerability to sexual exploitation, and can lead to increased risk of street involvement, and, in that context, to violence, ill-health, drug and alcohol addictions, and homelessness.

 

“The government has such strict guidelines and hard rules to get on welfare and there’s no other choice unless you turn to the street.” (Bob, Interview)

 
Her review concludes that, as a result of these factors, it appears that LGBT youth are indeed overrepresented in populations of homeless youth, that is to say, the percentage of LGBT youth among homeless youth is higher than the 5-20% identified as LGBT within the general population.

Modeled above are the following specific factors identified in the research literature as contributing to this over-representation:
Sexual minority youth (1) face sexism, heterosexism and monosexism at home (2) as well as in other environments (3, 4). Some sexual minority youth grow up in out-of-home care (3) from a very early age, others live in out-of-home care (e.g. foster families) later on, after they have run away from home, or have been kicked out. Rejection (2, 3, 4) is used as a general descriptor for a wide variety of experiences of sexual minority youth, such as sexual, physical and emotional abuse, physical and emotional neglect, homophobia, and heterosexism. As a result of subtle and not so subtle ways of being rejected in a variety of environments, many sexual minority youth feel isolated (5) and often have low self-esteem.
“My father was a strict physical discipline person. Pull out the belt. Most of it was verbal though. A lot of verbal, psychological damage. One day I took enough of it, called the police. So now it’s all verbal… every time I call he puts me down, says I’m useless.” (Tony)
Some youth are asked to leave home, find themselves on their own and, faced with a lack of financial and other resources (7), end up on the street (9).
“I have to refer kids, and try to hook kids up with outside resources, and there’s fewer and fewer outside resources all the time, and there’s fewer resources available for gay and lesbian kids for sure.”
(Jerome, teacher)
D’Augelli et al. (1998) observe that “upon disclosure [of non-heterosexual orientation], young people are likely to experience hostility from peers and, at best, varying degrees of ambivalence from parents, siblings, and extended families. Some, finding themselves cut off from both families and friends, may ultimately become homeless” (pp. 367-368). On the street, they may or may not turn to survival sex (8). Others may leave home in search of a more supportive community (6) on the street (9) or in search of emotional confirmation (6) in the form of sexual partners (8).
“My street friends are my family and I know they watch my back.” (Janice)
Part 2
The second phase of the literature review, carried out by Trish Salah, offers some supplementary and corrective recommendations to the initial review, covering both transgender/transsexual youth, and reviewing housing projects and programs which offer relevant and instructive models for establishing safe, affordable and supportive housing for LGBT youth. Particularly intriguing and yet troubling are observations arising from our initial review which flag the difficulty of accessing data on the situation of homeless youth who identify as transgender, of assessing the relative agency of youth engaging in survival sex and/or sex work (sometimes referred to as youth “at risk of sexual exploitation”) and of determining the character of the attachment of some homeless youth to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual/transgender communities and identities, as well as the role of sexual minority status, and homophobia in the decision of some youth to leave home at an early age.
“…the world is I think just generally unsafe for trans people. There is so much fucked up stuff that happens to trans people. Housing is just one place where it happens.” (Jackie)
Because whatever challenges thinking through the racial composition of street active queer and trans youth might entail, not to address matters of cultural specificity and racial oppression in surveying the situation of homeless and street active sexual minority youth makes it likely that a large percentage of such youth, who are trans youth and youth of colour, will be underrepresented or misrepresented by that survey. This in turn may contribute to the disidentification of some youth of colour and trans youth with “white” LGBT communities, identities, etc.


The area of LGBT activist scholarship is work which has ostensibly taken transgendered people as its object, but it has routinely done so in a fashion that obscures, erases or redescribes trans identities in the service of other agendas (Namaste 23, Prosser 55, Rubin 276). Likewise there is a significant history of feminist hostility towards intersexual, transsexual and transgender people and issues (Ross 10, Darke & Cope 8,9). This situation is shifting somewhat, and there is a growing body of responsible and respectful feminist and queer social research on trans issues (Fausto-Sterling, 1993, 2000, Cross 2001, Darke & Cope 2002).

In the context of social service delivery the implications of not addressing the misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of trans and intersex folk, is the alienation of trans and intersex population from the service provider, leading to a failure to access services (Namaste 177). According to surveys of shelter workers and policies conducted in Ontario in 1995 (Ross), 1997 (Namaste), 1999 (Cope & Darke), frequently trans people face the outright denial of social services (Ross 10).

“Being in queer housing just on its own would be so big of a thing for me because I would know that I was allowed to be queer or trans and have my identity affirmed by some care services…” (Jackie)

Namaste offers the following quotation from an Ontario shelter worker: “We do outreach with street kids—that’s our mandate. We don’t serve them [transgender youth]. Well, I guess maybe some of the kids are like that [transgendered] I don’t know.” (Namaste, 1999. p.174) Namaste goes on to say that in her interviews “representatives of agencies and shelters that work with homeless youth generally demonstrated an ignorance of transgender people…” even going so far as to coerce those trans youth who were allowed access into highly gender normative behaviour (Namaste, 1999. p.174/5).
It is important to keep in mind the extreme overrepresentation of youth of colour and aboriginal youth among street active and homeless populations (5). For service providers the challenge in providing support to gender and sexual minority youth will entail remaining sensitive to not only their ambivalent identifications and disidentifications with “western” signposts of gay culture (Munoz 4-8) but to culturally specific articulations of cross gender identities that may or may not resemble queer or trans sexualities, genders or cultural practices.
One final concern has to do with the question of sex work and its relation to trans identities. Contemporary transsexual and transgender activists have articulated the importance of sex work to male-to-female transsexual identity and community, as well as the detrimental effect of anti-prostitute attitudes and laws upon male-to-female transsexual and transgender lives. Anti-prostitute attitudes and laws contribute to routinized violence against sex workers and systemic difficulties in accessing housing, healthcare, and other social services. Even as respect for the lived cultural contexts, expertise and experiences of sex and gender minority youth is necessary in developing social supports for those who are grappling with the challenges of homelessness and street involvement, so sex work needs to be recognized a legitimate form of employment which many trans people pursue, and corresponding questions of the health and “safety” of that workplace necessarily addressed. A serious commitment to trans-positive service provision to street youth necessarily entails the adoption of a sex work positive model and, at minimum, a commitment to ameliorating if not contesting outright, the effects of criminalization on young trans peoples’ lives (Highcrest 1996: Statement by the National Committee on Prostitution, transsexuality, and HIV, 2001).

Looking at Other Models and Projects : Housing Support and Transitional Housing

Toronto’s recently opened Sherbourne Health Centre provides some supports to homeless and underhoused gay, lesbian and trans people, operating an infirmary/recuperative care unit for up to 30 people at a time.
Toronto’s 519 Community Centre and Seattle’s Lambert House provide similar sorts of support to homeless and street active sexual minority youth, through peer support groups, drop ins, skill building workshops, social service referrals and advocacy, and free meals and social events.


In terms of transitional housing for LGBT youth, San Fransisco’s Ark House, in the Castro district, opened in March of 2001, will house a maximum of 15 queer youth, for three to six months at a time.

In the Seattle area, The Orion Centre operates a home for sexual minority youth transitioning off the streets.
From Squats to Cooperative Housing
St. Clare’s Multifaith Housing Society came together in response to the escalating homeless crises in Toronto, and organized itself initially around supporting a group of street youth who were arrested for squatting an abandoned building at 88-90 Carlton Street. TASC raised $100,000 in pledges and $20,000 from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to purchase 25 Leonard and have converted it to affordable, self managed housing. 25 Leonard is not a LGBT specific housing initiative but it is an excellent model of how community allies and service providers can work with street involved people to create affordable, cooperative housing, and it is a model that is currently being emulated by those, including many queer and genderqueer youth, activists who are attempting to convert the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty’s 2002 Popesquat into affordable housing.
Housing Registries
In Ottawa, Housing Help, a non-profit, charitable agency, devoted to assisting people find safe, affordable, adequate housing is working to build a Housing Registry for the GLBT Community.
Toronto’s SOY, Supporting Our Youth is developing a similar housing registry that is specific to trans and queer youth and which operates in tandem with their youth mentoring program. This program matches lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual or transgender youth with adults from the lbtg community.
“…sometimes I think it scares us… because…we’re segregating a group that’s already segregated, but if we just step back for a minute and look there are men’s shelters, and there are women’s shelters … and there’s detox for people who are detoxing and so to have a shelter…specifically for young people who are GBLT, coming out, questioning I don’t think that its and issue of segregating I think it provides some safety I think it provides community, and I think it provides an opportunity to learn from your peers.” (Colleen, youth shelter worker)
 
Part 3
Michelle Reed’s paper, (appendix 3) entitled “Issues and Social Stigmas which Cause Gay and Lesbian Youth to be at Increased Risk for Becoming Street Involved,” is essentially a review of the literature surrounding youth and sexual identity. As such, it provides a theoretical matrix of sorts for mapping out the stages and barriers to queer and questioning (QQ) youths’ processes of sexual identification. Reed’s paper rests particularly on Hetrick and Martin’s (1987) analysis of the threefold nature of QQ youth isolation (social, emotional, and cognitive), and on Zera (1992) and Cass’s (1979) model of the six stages of homosexual identification. For the purposes of this project, these models must be interpreted as conceptual tools and NOT “practical maps” for an understanding of LGBT street youth; as Ruitenberg reminds us with regards to her own model, the interviews which form the nucleus of this project prove that the categories described so crisply in the literature become blurred and amorphous in practice. Within Reed’s paper, for instance, are contradictory reports on the relative risks/benefits of a QQ youth’s early sexual identification (McCreary Centre 1999, McDonald 1982).
Despite the limitations inherent in such a purely academic approach to the process of sexual identification, Reed’s paper is helpful in identifying and confirming the societal attitudes and stigmas which lead to many QQ youth becoming involved in street life. In particular, Reed emphasizes the traumatic effects on QQ youth which homophobia can exert in the home and at school, and notes that abuse and rejection is not restricted to physical violence; indeed, it is often the more subtle forms of verbal abuse and social ostracism which are more destructive to a QQ youth’s self-esteem.
“Fag is still the number one insult to a guy, and I think that harassment against homosexual students, is really prevalent, its everywhere and it kind of goes un-noticed.” (Jerome, teacher) Reed also notes the phenomenon of “dual denial,” where both the larger gay community and poverty services ignore the needs of a population at the intersection of homosexuality and poverty.
Most importantly, Reed emphasizes that LGBT youth’s high risk for homelessness and street involvement “is not inherent in being homosexual, but rather is related to society’s treatment of homosexuality.” This reinforces the principle, stressed throughout this report, that societal attitudes and stigmas are the first and often most insurmountable barrier to allowing street involved QQ youth to lead healthy and fulfilling lives.
 
Part 4
Darcie Bennett’s paper on the B.C. political-economic context and its implications provides a critical analysis of the new vulnerabilities to street involved queer youth by current economic policies. Social service, health, education and housing cuts, she urges, have “made British Columbia a far less secure place for young people.”
“ I totally think that counseling is like major, major important. I’ve been on and off the streets since I was 11 years old, I’m 18 now and this last time…I really needed counseling, you know I was in desperate need of it, and I went out to my community in search of counseling and its been a couple months and they still haven’t gotten through to me and that’s been through crisis response that’s when everything just sort of fell from there I didn’t know what to do anymore that’s why I came down on the streets…” (Janice)
Bennett suggests that “While the specific policies enacted by the current government are aimed at all resource-deprived young people, they are of particular concern to queer and questioning youth.” First, QQ youth are over represented among resource-deprived youth. In addition, Bennett explains, “Family rejection, social stigma, as well as the threat of violence in schools and the community, result in a lack of traditional support systems for queer and questioning youth, and increased economic marginalization in the places of last resort for young people in our society. This leaves these young people at risk of homelessness, malnutrition, illness, violence and sexual exploitation, all with potential long-term consequences”. Bennett stresses that “The ministry of children and families has had its budget cut by 23%. One of the first decisions made has been to cut child protection services to 16-18 year olds. This means that youth who face family violence at home due to their sexual identity, or failure to conform to expected gender roles, cannot turn to the state for protection.”
“When you get in trouble, the government is kind of like your parents…” (Jack)
The B.C. ministry of human resources, which is responsible for income assistance, has also undergone major restructuring. Youth now have to prove that they have been living independently of their parents for 2 years before being eligible for assistance. Youth who cannot return home, but have not been independent for 2 years, will now represent a class of citizens without a social safety net. Youth who can prove they have been independent for 2 years face reduced rates, a 3-week waiting period, and an end to the earnings exemption and the right to finish high school while on assistance if they are over 19.
It’s like Gordon Campbell is making it harder for kids that are working the stroll to get on income assistance….it’s totally wrong you know.” (Jay)
Training wages for youth have dropped to $6 an hour for the first 500 hours of work. This makes it hard to afford housing while you are in an employment training program, yet its next to impossible to continue work or work training while you are homeless.
“I wish they had told me ‘You’re not applicable right now. You have no place to live which means we cannot put you in a job program where you’re actively looking for work.” (Bob)
These reviews and reports are available here in an appendix to this final project report. Anyone interested in having a copy of these papers should email PH-research@sfu.ca.

 

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Footnotes

1. This descriptor is intended as inclusive of both youth who have affirmed, whether only for themselves, or more publicly, gender identifications other than heterosexual, and to include as well youth who may simply be unsure about gender and sexuality. The question of whom this research was actually about became a major, the major, question, as things turned out. See the discussion of gender in ‘out/comes’ section of this report. BACK

2. The original proposal was greatly assisted by the efforts of Dr. Mary Bryson, Faculty of Education, UBC, whose contributions are acknowledged with thanks. BACK

3. Like the school’s guidance counselor, from whom many youth reported they had no support. Presumably others DO feel supported by guidance counselors at school. BACK

4. Social science provides one way of understanding people and situations, but people and their lived situations are, we recognize, far more complex and finely wrought than charts and graphs and the language of ‘causes’ and ‘risk factors’ can hope to encompass. So we use these terms ‘ironically’, as invariably too-rough approximations of the ‘lived actualities’ of youth who become homeless/street-involved, in the service of trying to find out how family, housing and support services might be made more adequate for QQ youth as a particular group who are both over-represented among street-involved youth, and under-served by mainstream family, housing and support services. Athough research ‘consumers’ very often most value quantitative methods of research and reporting, we in this study have found greater accuracy, depth and significance in a combination of methods with face to face qualitative research guiding the work. BACK

5. A recent study by Christine Christensen & Leonard Cler-Cunningham for the Pace Society surveyed 183 Vancouver sex trade workers, and highlights the overrepresentation of Aboriginal youth among street active populations:
Our youngest contributor was 15 and the oldest was 51. In an industry where youth is a commodity it’s not surprising that over half were 24 and under…The average age of entry into the sex trade was 16.98. There is an immense overrepresentation of Aboriginal women in the street level sex trade (31.1%). According to the 1996 Census data from Statistics Canada, Aboriginals (North American Indian, Metis, Inuit) constitute only 1.7% of Greater Vancouver’s population. Almost three quarters of the women had left their parent’s or guardian’s home permanently at age 16 or younger. BACK