US: STUDY FINDS HOMELESS YOUTH TRADE SEX FOR FOOD AND SHELTER
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A new study has found homeless LGBTI youth are trading sex for food and a place to stay.
The New York based study ‘Streetwise and Safe' conducted by Meredith Dank of the Urban Institute interviewed 283 young LGBTI people who had engaged in ‘survival sex’,
Dank was prompted to explore the issue of homeless youth and survival sex agyre an earlier survey discovered LGBTI youth were seven times more likely to have traded sex for food or a place to stay.
Dank said there was not enough good information about why LGBT youths made these decisions, so her study attempted to let them tell their stories.
She told TIME magazine: “I realized at that point that there was so much that we didn’t know about this population. And if we were really going to be able to serve the needs of these young people we needed to know exactly what their experiences were and the large breadth of their experiences.”
Fifty-eight percent of the young people Dank interviewed lived either in a shelter or on the streets. Almost half of the participants were male, and the report includes insight into the experiences of trans males.
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DUH.
AS if we didn't know that.
