Youth Homelessness in Victoria Assignment Sample

• Subject Name : Arts and Humanities

Table of Contents

Introduction

Literature Review

Causes of Homeless of the youth

School level education is moderate

Unemployment, Low paying jobs and highly rented homes

Broken relationships

Alcohol and Drug Abuse

Misconceptions of the Society and Employers about street dwellers

Remedial Measures taken by the Government 

Conclusion

References

Introduction to Youth Homelessness in Victoria 

Australia is a country with beautiful landscapes, sceneries, sea beaches, excellent city lifestyle, marvellous architectures and serene view of its cities and their enjoyable culture. Victoria is a also a beautiful state with planned buildings in cities, excellent streets and roadways, entertainment parks, pubs and restaurants and every other facility a modern city has today. Amidst the happiness and grandeur of the delightful Victoria, there is a sad state of countless homeless youth that dwell in the beautiful cities of Melbourne and many other cities in the Australian state of Victoria. Government survey says that in the state of Victoria alone 1 out of 200 Aussies are homeless. Here is a chart describing the percentage.

Literature Review of Youth Homelessness in Victoria 

Government of Australia recognises all its citizens with compassion and due to the painful situations of some of the homeless citizens, in it has formulated a law that allows an Australian citizen to build their tents and stay in entertainment parks or at the backsides of the office buildings from 7 pm in the evening till 7 am in the morning (Johnson, Ribar & Zhu 2017).

Causes of Homeless of the youth

A recent survey of a homeless dweller, Pessy who is associated with an organisation which gives support to this section of the society has sketched a chart on a wall describing the numbers of homeless dwellers in Victoria (Johnson, Ribar & Zhu 2017). Here is the chart that was drawn by Pessy who is a homeless dweller in an Entertainment park in Melbourne capital city since 17 years now.

Figure 1: Study of Youth Homelessness

(Search: Herault & Johnson, 2016)

If the statistics of Pessy are to be believed, we find a huge number of people are seeking accommodation in the state of Victoria (Herault & Johnson, 2016). There are many social workers with their self help groups who have analysed theories based on through research about the causes of this alarming increase of homelessness in Australia. Some of the causes can be studied as disturbed family lives. There are ample youths who are teenagers and the age group category goes up to 45. Australians are independent minded self-respecting people. Socio economic status of a considerable population is standard.

However, there are family conflicts and teenagers suffer a disturbed family life owing to divorced parents and relatives lacking interest in owning their kids. Children of these families who are as young as 12 years of age suffer from depression, family abuse, physiological disorders, and inappropriate companionships developed online or through a corrupted friend (Herault & Johnson, 2016). These children run away from their homes in order to find solace and peace outside. They are not sure of what they are doing and unluckily never claimed back by the family members. With no food or shelter or even a job they find a place in the corner of the city where they start putting their nests and reside there permanently at the roadside.

Some children also face sexual abuse from a step father or a step brother in the family and are no longer able to take the continuous mental pain. Nobody in their homes listens to their problems and they prefer not to complain to police either because of lack of evidences or mere shame. Hence many such children escape family life at a young age of 14-15 (Johnson, Ribar & Zhu 2017).

School Level Education Is Moderate

Schools do not impose extra academic burden as Australian government believes that first ten years of education needs to be very primary and enjoyable. Students do not have much of examinations phobia and studies are all practical case analysis related. Students do not have to tax their brains for hours (Jefferson, 2018). Although the system is scientific but it has a driven a laziness drive in Australia and children take more pleasure and pass their time in internet games, friendships with unknown people of all kinds and are seriously demotivated at a tender age. Researchers also claim that many young people run away from their homes at a minimum age of 16 or 17 because they fall in love and their parents do not allow them to settle down at such a tender age especially because they do not even have a good job or any promising career. Data has shown that internet friendships, close friendships at school fancy youth to get into relationships of kind of what they assume to be permanent and these youth seek shelter in government shelter houses especially made for the homeless youth. They stay there as happy couples and do not comprehend the long term damage they do to themselves (Jefferson, 2018).

Unemployment, Low Paying Jobs and Highly Rented Homes

On one hand where there are clusters of unemployed homeless Aussies living in streets, there are also countless number of matured population of age groups 30-35 who face constant threat of losing their jobs at frequent intervals due to office politics, the employer selling away his business or cutting down the number of employees due to low profits (Steen, 2018). These people have a long phase of unemployment where these people have little savings to support only for their food and clothing. They cannot afford the costly rent of accommodations in their unemployed periods.

Many of the youths who run away are willing to work and settle down in a good home. However due to lack of motivation for higher education, these people end up in low paid jobs. They are able to sustain for food and clothing but unable to pay rent for even a standard residential apartment (Steen, 2018). Australian houses can be either bought on mortgage systems or hired for rent, but many of the standard bread earners also suffer from deep economic pressure of finding a good residence with reasonable rent. This is due to increased inflation in the country where flat rents have reached a sky high limit. Moreover many of the jobs in Australia such as Power Sector as Power Grid, Health Sector and Hospitality Sector have prolonged duty hours up to 12 hours a day and employees prefer to stay in locations nearer to their office. Most of them cannot afford the high price of accommodation near to office buildings and not have a choice of staying in a faraway location. These employees again have no other choice besides to put up tents in a location beside their office buildings and they again end up in getting into the cycle of homelessness once again (Baker et al., 2018).

Broken relationships

There are incidents where standard job earners hurriedly get hooked up and settle down for sharing a flat and end up in broken relationships soon where one of the partners chooses to stay away again in a homeless location making his life fall into the cycle of homelessness (Stonehouse, Threlkeld & Theobald, 2020). Many youths who had made a choice of homelessness due to love fantasies also break up after 3-4 years and prefer to stay in another homeless shelter and thereby increasing the number of spots.

Alcohol and Drug Abuse

Constant threat of insecurity amongst a mass youth population in Australia has driven them to these vulnerable inappropriate gestures of over consumption of alcohol, tobacco and even drugs. These highly intoxicated youth have become dangers to society and they do not have a good job or even a proper lifestyle (Batterham, 2019). They are being ill-treated by their landlords and driven away for unruly behaviour. State of Victoria has ample crowd of such kind. Such people are even disowned by their family and forced to live in the streets.

Misconceptions of the Society and Employers about Street Dwellers

There is an increased crime rate in homeless youth tents .An employee has to clarify all his personal details including citizenship, age, education .name and place of residence and fill up identity forms prior to getting selected for a job. When the homeless youth are not able to show their authentic place of stay, they are discriminated and put into low paid jobs. There is a prior notion that many of the youths are uneducated and of criminal mentality (Medlin, 2016). In real scenario these incidents of theft and robbery cannot be wiped out and the criminal tendencies of people are increasing each day due to such sufferings. People are angry, frustrated and have lack of sleeplessness and rough sleeping habits which lead them to inefficiency in work. Hence they are always conjectured as of employees with low output yield. Hence such a mass of people are always deprived of good positions in job even if some of them could be talented or proved as beneficial to the companies, they are not accounted in any way for their credibility. Increased sexual abuse in unsafe tents and extreme weather conditions, regular derogatory behaviour by cops to dismantle them makes them highly frustrated and unskilled to handle professional challenges. Their personal lives become a huge professional hazard (Batterham, 2019).

Remedial Measures taken by the Government

Government has made a considerable headway in helping the homeless youth stay in safe proper destinations till they get settled in their lives with proper jobs and handsome pay packages to afford their essential lifestyle. Recently a huge sum of 279 thousand US dollars was invested in building shelter homes for these people. The seventy percent of the fund was donated by the Government and rest 30% sponsored by rich businessmen and social work organisations (d’Abrera, 2018).

Instagram put up a social cause and organised a programme for the homeless youth in Victoria and arranged a comfortable sleeping zone for them for more than 12 hours so that these youths get stress free and enjoy and understand the importance of good sleep and a fresh mind ready for a new day of work (Martin, 2017).

Conclusion on Study of Youth Homelessness

A more progressive mindset of the Aussies will definitely help the huge homeless to stay with their families till they are eligible to settle down on their own. Government is also helping many of the youths to get connected with their families back again. There is a hope that situations will improve and homelessness will be a history soon.

References for Study of Youth Homelessness

Baker Collins, S., Schormans, A. F., Watt, L., Idems, B., & Wilson, T. (2018). The invisibility of disability for homeless youth. Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 27(2), 99-109.

Batterham, D. (2019). Defining “at-risk of homelessness”: re-connecting causes, mechanisms and risk. Housing, Theory and Society, 36(1), 1-24.

d’Abrera, C. (2018). Dying with their rights on: the myths and realities of ending homelessness in Australia.

Herault, N., & Johnson, G. (2016). Homelessness in Australia: Service reform and research in the 21st century. European Journal of Homelessness _ Volume, 10(3).

Jefferson, M. (2018). Employment Law Concentrate: Law Revision and Study Guide. Oxford University Press..

Johnson, G., Ribar, D. C., & Zhu, A. (2017). Women's Homelessness: International Evidence on Causes, Consequences, Coping and Policies.

Martin, W. (2017, March). A judge's view of homelessness. In Judicial Review: Selected Conference Papers: Journal of the Judicial Commission of New South Wales, The (Vol. 13, No. 2, p. 217). Judicial Commission of NSW.

Medlin, J. (2016). The Australian literacy and numeracy workforce: a literature review. Adelaide, Australia: National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER).

Steen, A. (2018). The many costs of homelessness. The Medical Journal of Australia, 208(4), 167-168.

Stonehouse, D., Threlkeld, G., & Theobald, J. (2020). Homeless pathways and the struggle for ontological security. Housing Studies, 1-20.

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