Street-involved women with co-occurring disorders experience distinct and overwhelming health and social issues, while facing considerable barriers to appropriate and helpful services. Street Connections, a Population and Public Health program, provides services to this and other street-involved aggregates using Harm Reduction and mobile outreach to prevent sexually transmitted infections and blood borne pathogens. Three conceptual frameworks, Gender-based Analysis, the Comprehensive, Continuous, Integrated System of Care, and Harm Reduction guided the practicum. The purpose of the practicum was to develop policy/practice recommendations for Street Connections regarding service enhancement for this aggregate. Literature-based best-practices were compared to three agency case studies of programs providing services to this aggregate including Street Connections, the Program of Assertive Community Treatment, and Dream Catchers. Data, consisting of agency documents and person-centered interviews with nine staff, were analyzed using open coding to identify themes. Recommendations incorporate gender-based analysis, recovery, access, engagement, screening, integrated services, and staff development/support.

Harsh Reality is a print resource aimed toward the population of street-involved youth. Created by a working group of street-involved youth in partnership with a research nurse, Harsh Reality is a unique hybrid of factual information, and art and written experienced submitted by street-involved youth themselves. Harsh Reality contains information about a variety of topics, notably sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS. A case study method was used to evaluate aspects of both project process and outcomes. The case study was guided by three areas of study: street-involved youth's perceptions of the resource, retention of specific knowledge outcomes from the resource, and method of resource distribution. The primary sources of data were street-involved youth themselves. Findings of this study include a description of the target audience's perception of the resource, an analysis of specific knowledge uptake, an assessment of various methods of resource distribution, and possible suggestions for future resources.

Street-involved women with co-occurring disorders experience distinct and overwhelming health and social issues, while facing considerable barriers to appropriate and helpful services. Street Connections, a Population and Public Health program, provides services to this and other street-involved aggregates using Harm Reduction and mobile outreach to prevent sexually transmitted infections and blood borne pathogens. Three conceptual frameworks, Gender-based Analysis, the Comprehensive, Continuous, Integrated System of Care, and Harm Reduction guided the practicum. The purpose of the practicum was to develop policy/practice recommendations for Street Connections regarding service enhancement for this aggregate. Literature-based best-practices were compared to three agency case studies of programs providing services to this aggregate including Street Connections, the Program of Assertive Community Treatment, and Dream Catchers. Data, consisting of agency documents and person-centered interviews with nine staff, were analyzed using open coding to identify themes. Recommendations incorporate gender-based analysis, recovery, access, engagement, screening, integrated services, and staff development/support.

Harsh Reality is a print resource aimed toward the population of street-involved youth. Created by a working group of street-involved youth in partnership with a research nurse, Harsh Reality is a unique hybrid of factual information, and art and written experienced submitted by street-involved youth themselves. Harsh Reality contains information about a variety of topics, notably sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS. A case study method was used to evaluate aspects of both project process and outcomes. The case study was guided by three areas of study: street-involved youth's perceptions of the resource, retention of specific knowledge outcomes from the resource, and method of resource distribution. The primary sources of data were street-involved youth themselves. Findings of this study include a description of the target audience's perception of the resource, an analysis of specific knowledge uptake, an assessment of various methods of resource distribution, and possible suggestions for future resources.

The purpose of this thesis research is to describe the availability of social support among street-involved youth and how this longitudinally predicts their substance use, mental health and mental well-being. Data from a panel study of street-involved youth in Victoria, British Columbia were analyzed (N=130). Thematic analysis of responses to open-ended questions and descriptive analyses of survey data were conducted to describe the availability of social support in participants’ lives. Multivariate regression was used to test two prominent theories of the relationship between social support and health (the stress-buffering and main effect theories) and to examine the association between sources of social support and health. The thematic analysis and descriptive analysis results indicate that there is considerable heterogeneity in terms of the availability, sources and types of social support among this population. The regression results provide partial support for the main effect theory; perceived availability of social support predicted reduced alcohol and hard drug use and better overall mental health and well-being, regardless of the stress levels. The stress-buffering theory was not supported. Sources of social support were not significantly related to health outcomes. The thesis concludes with policy and program suggestions and gives direction for further research on the relationship between social support and health among street-involved youth. / Graduate / 0626 / 0347 / 0573 / mary06@uvic.ca

This thesis explores street involved youth friendship in Victoria, Canada. The friendships of street involved youth—that is “young people who may or may not be homeless and spend some time in the social and economic world of ‘the street’” (Perkin 2009)—are regularly thought and talked about as being prone to deviant or risky behaviour, particularly in social scientific literature and by the mainstream media. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 street involved youth (ages 16 – 21) who talked about friendships as important relationships offering (among other things) help, protection, support, nurture and meaningful existences not available to them otherwise. Street youth friendships allow youth some escape and respite from damaging neoliberal political-economic policies in Victoria, Canada. In addition, street involved youth friendships bring into question dominant developmentalist discourses and assumptions as youth agentively and expertly negotiate their friendships in careful and nuanced ways. / Graduate / 0326 / twerdal@uvic.ca

This thesis examines the role of structural violence in the contemporary transition to adulthood of street involved youth. Anchored in structural social work, the study understands the origin of social problems and of violence to be structural rather than individual. Conducted in two phases, the study used participatory action and arts-informed methods, group discussions, and semi-structured interviews. Autonomy, a key component of the contemporary transition to adulthood, was central to the research results. The findings demonstrated that structural violence works to misrepresent or to nullify street involved youths’ expressions of autonomy. Structural violence affects how they exercise and manifest their autonomy as well as how their autonomy is represented or socially valued. The findings made visible the invisible structural violence, illuminating social causes of individual problems. Accordingly, to better support street involved youth and the development of their autonomy during their transition to adulthood, the study proposes recommendations for practice, policy, and research that target systems level change.

Artwork / Streetlives is a community-based, arts-informed, research project which addresses harm reduction amongst street youth in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Nine street-involved participant researchers (supported by a team of researchers and community organizations) used art making and storytelling as ways of understanding the risks specific to street-involved youth in Thunder Bay. Due to the heterogeneous nature of the participant researcher group and a majority of Aboriginal research participants, a novel approach was used to create principles of research collaboration, in pursuit of the principles of ownership, control, access and possession for ethical research with Aboriginal peoples. The participant researchers found that their most common experience was their vulnerability to governmental social services and law enforcement personnel and policies. They further agreed that the risk of losing their children to child protection services is a source of increased vulnerability and a barrier to accessing treatment. They all agreed that the process of art making was fruitful and were surprised by the clarity and evocative nature of their artwork, finding that meeting weekly to do art is gratifying and therapeutic. They were interested to discover that the art they created, just by telling their stories, contained strong prevention messages they would have been influenced by as younger people. As such the participants want to continue making art, and showing their work, particularly to young people, social service providers, and law enforcement officers, who they think are in the best position to learn from it. This project is building capacity in the community (by teaching artmaking, group work, organizing, critical thinking, and presentation skills), is contributing to scholarship, and significantly and positively impacting the lives of the participant researchers. This work is represented in traditional academic prose and as collaborative fiction.

Artwork / Streetlives is a community-based, arts-informed, research project which addresses harm reduction amongst street youth in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Nine street-involved participant researchers (supported by a team of researchers and community organizations) used art making and storytelling as ways of understanding the risks specific to street-involved youth in Thunder Bay. Due to the heterogeneous nature of the participant researcher group and a majority of Aboriginal research participants, a novel approach was used to create principles of research collaboration, in pursuit of the principles of ownership, control, access and possession for ethical research with Aboriginal peoples. The participant researchers found that their most common experience was their vulnerability to governmental social services and law enforcement personnel and policies. They further agreed that the risk of losing their children to child protection services is a source of increased vulnerability and a barrier to accessing treatment. They all agreed that the process of art making was fruitful and were surprised by the clarity and evocative nature of their artwork, finding that meeting weekly to do art is gratifying and therapeutic. They were interested to discover that the art they created, just by telling their stories, contained strong prevention messages they would have been influenced by as younger people. As such the participants want to continue making art, and showing their work, particularly to young people, social service providers, and law enforcement officers, who they think are in the best position to learn from it. This project is building capacity in the community (by teaching artmaking, group work, organizing, critical thinking, and presentation skills), is contributing to scholarship, and significantly and positively impacting the lives of the participant researchers. This work is represented in traditional academic prose and as collaborative fiction.

Grieving Online: Street-Involved Youths’ Use of Social Media After a Death conveys the context and lived experiences of 20 street-involved youth in Victoria BC, who live both on the streets and on line simultaneously (boyd, 2008a). Using a narrative methodology, including poetry, I explore how these realities affect the grief experiences after a death. Youth strategize to find access to computers and cell phones, using free wifi, sharing minutes, or buying or trading devices in the street economy in order to communicate through texting and viewing and posting to Facebook. Dire financial and unstable living situations, the complex and difficult relationships they have with both family and friends and the traumatic circumstances they have endured directly contributes to stress and anxiety and the ways they grieve the losses of people in their lives. This vulnerability, violence and instability is entangled both in their face to face interactions and in private and public communications online. It is also directly connected to the concept of precarity: “that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler, 2009, p.ii). There are several key findings from youths’ narratives. First, although youth often see themselves as outsiders from “regular society”, they have taken up a normative discourse of a “grieving subject” in their language and stories. This is a discourse of progress that includes stages and tasks and the understanding that to grieve is to do work. I argue that for many youth, this discourse is heightened because the stakes are high: their lives are surveilled by police and child protective services. Sometimes shunned by family of the deceased, or without private spaces to mourn, their expressions of grief are exposed and sometimes criminalized. Second, I argue that throughout their narratives, youth position themselves as moral beings and actors talking about and making sense of death through hierarchies of values and decisions, and framing the death as an opportunity to explore how they want to be in the world or how the world should be. This vision of street-involved youth actively experimenting in the moral laboratory (Mattingly, 2013) of the street and the moral predicaments they faced when grieving challenges the social stereotypes of street-involved youth as delinquent, loners, dysfunctional, refusing to ‘grow up’ and ‘be responsible.’ Third, youth spoke about negotiating and managing relationships both in person and within the affordances of social networking sites (boyd 2009) such as the visibility and persistence of online discussions. My findings demonstrate that these affordances have implications after a death. For example, youth were wrestling with the performances of grief online, trying to make sense “to what extent these declarations of grief are public posturing and to what extent they are genuine, personal expressions of deep feeling” (Dobler, 2006, p.180). Youth caution about posting too quickly about the death online, so that family or close friends would not have to find out online. They value communication that is private, face-to-face, or by phone that is intentional and acknowledges the importance of relationship with the deceased. Their thoughtful expertise can help all of us as we try to navigate the experiences of grieving online. Although they shared a great deal of ambivalence for the place of social media in their lives, for many it is a powerful tool to tell themselves and others about who they are and how they want to be remembered. / Graduate