Addressing the Complexities of Family and Relationship Violence
When young people seek help from an emergency shelter funded by the Family and Youth Services Bureau (FYSB), nearly 9 times out of 10 they cite “family dynamics” among the reasons they left home.
The term can indicate many kinds of conflict—arguing with parents or a step parent, not getting along with a sibling—but for many young people it reflects an atmosphere of violence and abuse at home.
In fact, data collected by FYSB shows that a quarter or more of youth served by the Bureau’s Basic Center and Transitional Living Programs report abuse and neglect at home.
And research on street youth suggests that experiencing abuse at home increases the likelihood of being mistreated or becoming violent on the street. As the Federal agency that administers both runaway and homeless youth programs and family violence prevention and services programs, FYSB believes it is important for grantees and youth workers to understand the complexities of both family and relationship violence—especially as they relate to runaway and homeless youth.
For instance, while basic center programs aim to reunify families, they have to tread carefully when abuse enters the equation. Ensuring that a youth can safely return home can become especially difficult if someone in the household has verbally, emotionally, physically, or sexually abused the young person or another person in the home. Sending a young person back into a violent, abusive environment can be dangerous, youth workers say.
Another complication arises when a young victim of family or street violence has also abused others.
“In regular services, there are a perpetrator and a victim,” says Chic Dabby, director of the Asian & Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence at the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum. “In [runaway and homeless youth], the perpetrator is also a victim in some other context.” For instance, a young person abused at home or sexually assaulted on the street might perpetuate the cycle of violence by abusing siblings or peers.
Youth workers have also found that runaway and homeless youth experience intimate partner violence— in which a boyfriend, girlfriend, or romantic partner physically, verbally, or emotionally abuses a young person—in different ways than their peers with stable homes do. Living on the street, young people are more likely to encounter violent situations and less likely to have people they can rely on to help them get out of those situations.
“Runaway and homeless youth have little or no support system,” says Lauren Cosetti, a case manager at Sand Castles Runaway and Homeless Youth Services in Ocean City, Maryland. These young people may find it hard to leave an abusive relationship, she says, because they feel the abuser is the only person they can depend on.
At the same time, adolescent dating violence shares many of the same characteristics as adult relationship violence, says Dawn Schatz, who directs youth development programs at Child, Inc., in Wilmington, Delaware. Schatz says that, like adult abusers, many young people who commit violence are often seeking to exert control because they feel like their lives are out of control.
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