Street-Youth Experiences Told Through Digital StoriesStreet-involved youth are a vulnerable population whose experiences are not always captured in other youth-targeted surveys. To address this gap, the Health Sexuality and Risk Reduction & the Epidemiology Programs at Ottawa Public Health (OPH) recently released the results of the Enhanced Street Youth Surveillance System (E-SYS) 2011 and companion digital stories - a creative interpretation and presentation of their results. In one digital story, we follow a young man’s introduction to Drugs and his subsequent downward spiral. The personal story is intertwined with findings from the survey: there are more than 1200 youth in Ottawa who have been without a home for three or more days in the last six months; 1 in 5 street-involved youth have injected drugs; half of street involved youth who inject drugs have sex in order to get something like drugs, money, or a place to stay. In the second digital story, a nineteen year old woman suffering from alcoholism, describes her dangerous lifestyle and the toll it takes on her physical and mental health. Plagued by frequent blackouts and conflicts, she represents the daily and nightly struggles that alcohol and drug addicted street-involved youth endure.Behaviours and topics assessed by E-SYS include several dimensions of the street-involved youths’ lives:
- demographics
- sexual orientation
- alcohol use
- non-injection and injection drug use
- amount of time spent on the street
- mental and physical health, education level
- employment and legal/illegal sources of income
- jail/prison time
- services accessed/gaps in service experienced
- barriers to accessing health services
- risky sexual behaviours/coerced or transactional sex
- pregnancysexually transmitted and blood-borne infection rates
