High prevalence of exposure to the child welfare system among street-involved youth in a Canadian setting: implications for policy and practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Street-involved youth are more likely to experience trauma and adverse events in childhood; however, little is known about exposure to the child welfare system among this vulnerable population. This study sought to examine the prevalence and correlates of being in government care among street-involved youth in Vancouver, Canada. METHODS: From September 2005 to November 2012, data were collected from the At-Risk Youth Study, a prospective cohort of street-involved youth aged 14-26 who use illicit drugs. Logistic regression analysis was employed to identify factors associated with a history of being in government care. RESULTS: Among our sample of 937 street-involved youth, 455 (49%) reported being in government care at some point in their childhood. In a multivariate analysis, Aboriginal ancestry (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 2.07; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.50-2.85), younger age at first "hard" substance use (AOR = 1.10; 95% CI: 1.05-1.16), high school incompletion (AOR = 1.40; 95% CI: 1.00-1.95), having a parent that drank heavily or used illicit drugs (AOR = 1.48; 95% CI: 1.09-2.01), and experiencing physical abuse (AOR = 1.90; 95% CI: 1.22-2.96) were independently associated with exposure to the child welfare system. CONCLUSIONS: Youth with a history of being in government care appear to be at high-risk of adverse illicit substance-related behaviours. Evidence-based interventions are required to better support vulnerable children and youth with histories of being in the child welfare system, and prevent problematic substance use and street-involvement among this population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".