Danger Is a Constant Companion for Street Kids

When the naked body of a 19-year-old woman was found behind a church in Times Square last August, no newspaper ran the story. No suspects have been named. Too few leads came in to the Crimestoppers.

Instead, April very quietly became another of the approximately 5,000 young people who die every year due to street violence, illnesses or suicide, according to Covenant House, the largest privately-funded provider of services to runaway and homeless young people. April had stayed at Covenant House several times before her death.

But when you look at the statistics, you can easily see the factors that put young people without a permanent address at risk of violence and death.

A recent study by the Covenant House Institute, which conducts research on issues affecting the agency's young people, traced the prevalence of violence in their lives before they ended up on the streets. It found that 41 percent of the young people had witnessed acts of violence in their homes, 19 percent were beaten with an object, the same percentage were sexually abused and 15 percent said someone close to them had been murdered. To these young people, physical danger is a constant companion.

And young people who are used to abuse at home may be at higher risk of being abused or becoming abusive in their own relationships, according to the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, which developed a tool kit for preventing dating violence among homeless and runaway youth.

Violence against homeless young people can not fully be addressed until it is accurately measured. One step to address that problem is included in legislation to include homeless people under the protection of hate crime laws, increasing penalties for attacking people based on the belief that they are homeless.

House Bill 3419 and Senate Bill 1765 have been referred to committees, and would require the inclusion of crimes against homeless people in hate crime data collection.

Maryland, Maine and Washington, D.C. have already included homeless people in their anti-hate crime laws, while similar measures are under consideration in California, Florida and South Carolina.

Supporters of including homeless people in hate crime laws, including the National Coalition for the Homeless, note that between 1999 and 2007, the homeless victims of lethal hate crimes outnumber the number of other hate-related fatalities by more than 2.5 to 1. The Coalition also reported that violence against the homeless increased 65 percent between 2005 and 2006.

Would April's death count as the death of a homeless person? Covenant House workers are not sure where she was staying after she left the New York City shelter. Did she have a roof over her head? We may never know.

At the memorial service Covenant House held for April, mourners sang "Over the Rainbow," her favorite song. But she never had a chance for her dreams to come true.

Kevin Ryan, the president of Covenant House, announced the creation of the April Fund to help fight violence against street kids. As he said in announcing the fund last week, "The best and only way to honor April's memory is to reach more kids before life on the street robs us of their spirit, their courage and their promise." Money raised will be used to redouble and, at some sites, relaunch Covenant House's street outreach programs.