Non-Technical Summary:
Youth homelessness has become an increasingly prevalent issue across the country. Research suggests that those who experience homelessness when they are young are more vulnerable to experiencing long-term homelessness throughout the life course. This is problematic because homelessness can have considerable negative impacts on individuals’ lives, as it often leads to poor educational and occupational attainment, and mental and physical health issues.
Given the severity of the problem, Australian governments have introduced policies to improve strategies for preventing youth homelessness and ameliorating its negative effects. However, to date these policies have made little progress in addressing the issue. This demonstrates the need for further research into youth homelessness policy to improve understandings of how such policy interacts with service provision, and to what effect.
One aspect of policy which has piqued the interest of scholars in recent years is the way social issues are represented through policy discourse. Discourse can be described as the way particular words and forms of language are used to construct a representation of a topic. This is important, as the way a policy represents a problem can influence the way the problem is addressed.
This research examines representations of youth homelessness in two seminal Australian policy documents published 20 years apart, revealing the impact these representations have had on approaches to service provision. In doing so, it questions and challenges dominant discourses surrounding youth homelessness, and demonstrates how policy-makers’ use of language impacts on the solutions implemented to address the issue. Overall, this research suggests that greater communication and collaboration is needed between governments, communities, and homeless youth themselves in order to provide this group with the support they need to make a sustainable transition out of homelessness.