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Children Homeless in U.S.
By Anne-Marie O'Connor
Every night more than 1 million children in America face the dark
with no place to call home. They are hungry, anxious and often
exposed to violence. They shuttle between shelters and fall behind
in school. (That is, where there are shelters with empty
beds. WFI Editor) They are the vulnerable new
face of the America homeless. Experts say that there are more
homeless children in America than at any time since the Great
Depression. About 40% of America's homeless are now women and
their children - the fastest growing homeless group. (Women and
children have been the fastest growing group of homeless for most
of the 1990s. But when the Democrats won back the White House,
it became less fashionable for the media to run news items on
the homeless crisis. WFI Editor)
These are the conclusions of an unprecedented study unveiled Wednesday
(30 June, 1999) that shows that this transient childhood on the
mean streets of America is shortchanging children, robbing them
of education, health and emotional stability. The study's report,
presented Wednesday at a women's conference in Los Angeles, documents
how children are being scarred by the kind of trauma that ravages
survivors of war and natural disasters - condemning some to mental
illness. "The face of homelessness in this country has changed
dramatically," said Ellen Bassuk, an associate professor
of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and president of the Better
Homes Fund, which produced the report, "Homeless Children:
America's Newest Outcasts." The fund is a national nonprofit group that uses research and fieldwork to recommend policies and programs to benefit the homeless. It derived its figures for the study from national homeless organizations, the U.S. Department of Education and the census. "Young children are without homes in the largest numbers since the Great Depression," said Bassuk. "We must act now to halt this epidemic before we lose another generation." (Apparently, Ms. Bassuk has already written off the last generation of homeless. WFI Editor) In the early 1980s, the number of homeless children was negligible, Bassuk said. Since then, divorce and the growth of female-headed families - about a third of which live in poverty - have conspired to turn growing numbers of women with children into the streets, even as the nation enjoys one of the longest sustained economic booms in history. SOURCE: Excerpted from the 1 July, 1999, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, from an article entitled, "Ranks of Homeless Children in the U.S. Is on the Rise, Study Finds." Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.(WFI EDITOR: The homeless crisis is not only a source of national shame for the richest country in the world, especially since the Federal Government has properties across the country that reverted to its possession upon the fall of the savings and loan industry, which it has never really put to the use of resolving this crisis; it is also a crisis that threatens the public safety of every American citizen who is not homeless, to say nothing of the safety of property. Homeless people have nothing to lose, and the very experience of homelessness is one of feeling abandoned and rejected. The forces that are exerted on homeless people, both by government and the citizenry, and even the non-profits that are supposed to be addressing their problems, all work to the effect of reducing the self-esteem of those individuals who become homeless, ultimately putting the great majority of them at risk of developing mental illness and drug addiction.The end result are people who are reduced to the level of animals determined to survive, who will resort to desperate means such as crimes which cross the thin veneer of what it means to be civilized. The bottom line is that this is something that could be avoided, if local, state and the national governments all recognized the crisis at hand, and took it seriously enough to handle it. There is more than enough money to build new sports stadiums, and new freeways, and new offices for government bureaucracies. There should be money for SOLVING the homeless crisis, especially since the real cost, in terms of money, is virtually pennies a day. The next time some local atrocity is attributed to "transients," just remember that it could have been avoided, if the leaders of the community would do their job, and lead.)
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