Many teens struggle everyday with all sorts of problems, but not having a home should not be one. In the United States alone, about one-third of the homeless are just young teens on the street. This is a huge social justice issue because no minor should have to fend for themselves on the streets and struggle for money, food, and shelter. Those kinds of problems are a stress that should not even be a factor in a young teenager’s life. Homeless youth have been rapidly increasing and is a growing problem in the U.S. which has affected many people and must be recognized with more interest for the welfare of these teens. Teens usually become homeless because of the situations and difficult circumstances that occur in their lives. Studies estimate that 20% of youth who arrive at homeless shelters directly from foster care in the previous year. Foster care is the system that youth should feel secure in, with the people working for it doing their jobs properly. Not for the people to just forget and no longer care about these teens and just let them slip underneath all their other cases and then become wards of the state. Some homeless youth have run away from homes where they were victims of physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse. On study reports that more than 4 in 10 youth speak up about physical abuse. This is often the case where the teen feels so unsafe at home that they have no other choice but to leave. Unfortunately, they may be trading one bad situation for an even worse one, because no matter how bad things get at home, at least they were able to call somewhere their own “home,” instead of having nothing. Another reason for teens to become homeless is that they were kicked out or rejected by their families because of the choices they made and are generally not socially accepted. For example, a teen becoming pregnant may outrage their parents or a teen revealing their sexual orientation could cause them to be rejected and put out on the streets. A lot of people assume that all homeless youth are runaways, when in reality it is sometimes their own families
