Sexual consent education among youth experiencing homelessness in Toronto, Canada: Findings from an arts-based and qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Homeless youth face elevated risks of sexual violence, diminishing their access to sexual-well-being, justice and health. Sexual consent—expressed agreement, capacity and freedom to participate in sexual practices—is fundamental to realising sexual well-being, yet is underexplored with this population. Arts-based approaches are promising for advancing health and well-being, yet gaps exist regarding their role in sexual consent education with homeless youth. This study explores homeless youth experiences of sexual consent and violence, and the potential of arts-based approaches in sexual consent education. We conducted online focus groups and in-depth interviews (2021–2022) with youth who have experienced homelessness, and key informant (KI) interviews with youth workers in Toronto. We explored: a) understandings of sexual consent, b) needs and challenges in sexual consent education, and c) two arts-based sexual consent education approaches (poetry and comics). Data were transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically, informed by the social contextual framework which attends to relational, material, and symbolic contexts. Participants ( N = 24) included 17 youth aged 18–29 with homelessness experiences (4 FGs; 5 interviews; mean age 22.57, SD 3.22), and 7 KI (1 FG; 5 interviews; mean age 27.25, SD 5.54). Factors shaping exposure to sexual violence victimization included: relational (in-person and digital sexual spaces, lack of social support), material (insecure housing, poverty) and symbolic (gender, sexual orientation, substance use stigmas) contexts. These create environments where homeless youth experience diminished sexual self-determination, security and safety. Poetry and comics are effective and acceptable when tailored to the realities of homeless youth, and focused on empowerment rather than only technical skills.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".