What is Youth Homelessness?
“Youth homelessness occurs where an individual between the ages of 13 and 26 is experiencing rooflessness or houselessness or is living in insecure or inadequate housing without a parent, family member or other legal guardian”
When people think of homelessness, they usually think of people rough sleeping, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Young people are often homeless because it is not safe for them to stay at home, or because family life has become too hard. Young People are often sleeping on sofas, on floors, in cars or, worse still, with strangers. These all legally constitute being homeless, and are broadly referred to as forms of ‘hidden homelessness’. As young people’s homelessness is far more likely to be ‘hidden’ it is often overlooked and misunderstood as an issue by society.
The right to adequate housing is recognised as a fundamental human right defined as living in security, peace and dignity. When young people cannot realise this right, they are more likely to develop mental health issues, experience social isolation and not be in employment, education or training.
Research has shown that young people who have suffered significant adversity in their childhood, are 16 times more likely than the general population to experience homelessness. We also know that intersectionality places a role in who is forced to face homelessness, with Care Leavers, LGBTQ+ young people and neurodivergent young people at a particular risk.
Why Treat Youth Homelessness Differently?
Research shows that in a sample of people experiencing homelessness in Wales, 48% first experienced homelessness before the age of 21.
A further 73% had been homeless at least twice in their lives, showing that once you become homeless once, it is sadly likely to happen again. This shows that for adults who experience homelessness, their journeys often started when they were young. But if we intervene early and effectively prevent youth homelessness, we could end adult homelessness within a generation.
It’s also important to understand that the causes and impact of homelessness on young people tend to differ from the experiences of adults. Young people experiencing homelessness are at a key developmental period, socially, psychologically, and physiologically. Additionally, at the point of crisis, young people are without experience of independent living and the resilience of adulthood, which can make it harder to navigate the stressful and overwhelming experience of homelessness.
Young people are less likely to sleep on the streets and are more likely to experience forms of hidden homelessness like sofa-surfing, sleeping in cars, or living in an abusive home. As a result, youth homelessness often remains invisible and young people may not realise that they are experiencing homelessness.
Young people are also treated differently under a number of areas of law. For example, at present, young people under the age of 35 are restricted in the amount of housing benefit they can access to secure accommodation.
According to government figures, relationship breakdown is the single greatest direct cause of homelessness. Family breakdowns are a crisis at any age but they are likely to be more immediately threatening to a young person who is dependent on family members for a home. Often an individual won’t know where to turn for advice and support, leaving them in unsafe and potentially abusive situations.
For all of these reasons, youth homelessness requires a distinct approach. This means services provided by experts in working with young people, designed for and by young people, which seek to prevent homelessness and support those who do experience it to ensure that it is brief and unrepeated.
Numbers of Young People Experiencing Homelessness
Due to the hidden nature of many young people’s experiences of homelessness, which may include them sofa-surfing with friends, or sleeping in cars, or sheds, accurately quantifying the number of people who experience homelessness as a child or young adult is difficult. Statutory data shared by Welsh Government relies on young people presenting to their local authority for help, which we know that some young people don’t do, so official statistics are unlikely to represent the full scale of youth homelessness in Wales.
With this in mind, the graph below demonstrates the numbers of young people presenting as homeless in Wales in the years since EYHC began in 2017.
NB: The 2019/20 financial year is not included in this graph as homelessness data was not collected that year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.