This report is the culmination of over 3 years of Justice for Girls’ work around the prevention of homelessness of teenage girls in Canada. Report prepared by Asia Czapska, Annabel Webb & Nura Taefi.
Read the report: More than Bricks and Mortar: A Rights-Based Strategy to Prevent Girl Homelessness in Canada
Introduction
Justice for Girls (JFG) was founded on a vision of social justice and equality in the lives of teenage girls and the belief that young women who live and have lived in poverty must define the solutions to girl homelessness. Given resources and support, especially from feminist women’s groups, young women in poverty can, and must, define what they need, and push for that change. Following from that premise, in 2004 Justice for Girls began a three-year project, the Housing Strategy, to identify pathways to, impacts of, and solutions to girl homelessness. Girls and women who have experienced poverty and homelessness led the direction, content and work of the project.
Throughout the Housing Strategy we interviewed 50 young women who were homeless or who had been homeless as teens. We interviewed activists who worked with homeless girls and visited several youth and women’s housing organizations in Surrey, Vancouver and Toronto. A guiding group of women who had various knowledge and personal experiences of homelessness helped to guide this project. We reviewed literature on youth homelessness with a critical eye to issues that affect diverse groups of girls: Aboriginal1 girls, young moms and racialized girls, for example.
This strategy incorporates the knowledge of women and girls with whom we have talked and whose writings we have read. It is based on the individual and collective experiences of girls and young women; it is a response to violations of their rights that they described; and it articulates what they told us they need in order to experience freedom, dignity and safety in their lives.
Girl homelessness must be understood within a context of social and economic inequality and cannot be stopped without a full-fledged fight for girls’ equality. We can only achieve equality in the lives of girls when we commit ourselves to ending racism, poverty, male violence and other conditions of oppression that young women encounter every day.
People’s basic human rights are entrenched in international law. This includes the right to an adequate standard of living and adequate housing.2 Under Article 11 of the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which Canada ratified in 1976, Canada recognizes:
…the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself [sic] and his [sic] family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions.
Moreover, under Article 27 of the UN International Convention on the Rights of the Child, every child has the right to:
…a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.
Our housing strategy thus moves beyond the “bricks and mortar” approach to stopping homelessness and instead focuses on how to ensure an adequate standard of living—including the right to live in security, peace and dignity—as a concrete reality in the lives of girls. We begin with a reframing of girl homelessness that locates the problem within a feminist understanding of social and economic inequality in Canada. We explore how social and economic inequalities both create and exacerbate situations of homelessness and violence in young women’s lives. We then move on to demonstrate how the government has sometimes created, and often contributed to problems of girl homelessness and violence against girls by failing to fulfill its legal obligations to girls under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and various international treaties.
We propose a strategy that prevents girls from becoming homeless and ensures that girls are housed in safety and dignity. We argue that prevention and responses to girl homelessness must begin with the purpose of achieving girls’ basic human rights and especially freedom from male violence. Ultimately, we hope that other community groups—women’s groups, youth organizations, anti-poverty advocates—will embrace rights-based strategies to ending girl homelessness and that girls’ human rights will become a reality in Canada and around the world.
We recommend four key actions to prevent and respond to girl homelessness in Canada:
- Prevent and respond to domestic sexual abuse of girls;
- Implement a rights-based national housing strategy that focuses on girl homelessness and the eradication of poverty;
- Stop the continued colonization of Indigenous peoples in Canada; and
- Create transitional and long-term housing that is girl-only and based on feminist principles and practices.
Read the full report: More than Bricks and Mortar: A Rights-Based Strategy to Prevent Girl Homelessness in Canada