Rethink Resources

I don’t know if you caught a detail from my post on Tuesday about the recent research out of Chicago about youth in the sex trade.

But the law enforcement person I quoted from the report talked about sharing the frustration of youth, who lacking a safe place to stay and having reported involvement in the sex trade, are taken to hospitals. By which they mean psychiatric hospitals. A practice that I’ve found to be common in Chicago for minors who disclosed or were found to be involved in the sex trade, especially if the youth were also in foster care or somehow connected to child protective services.

Now some would argue that youth in the sex trade are undoubtedly going through emotional distress and could benefit from mental health care. I would suggest that we don’t really know if the youth is experiencing the kind of severe emotional distress that might warrant a stay in a psychiatric hospital until talking with each youth. Sure, support and counseling can be helpful to anyone but that’s different than a locked facility where forced medication and another label is sure to follow.

Additionally making it a practice of routinely institutionalizing minors suspected or revealed involvement in the sex trade is outrageous and needs to stop. I don’t know how common it is in other cities but for Chicago youth it’s an often shared experience (”oh, you’ve been to Hartgrove? But have you been to Lakeshore?”).

It’s the result of a lot of things. It’s about a serious lack of training about how to effectively support youth who’ve been involved in the sex trade. It’s about social service workers covering themselves against potential questions later on about their decisions as child protection workers. It’s about adults not listening to youth. It’s about a lack of safe, meaningful spaces to live for youth and to heal physically and emotionally. It’s about a response that still makes youth out to be the problem and not our communities.

In some situations youth will refuse to go for otherwise needed assistance because they are convinced a SASS worker will be there. Again this is a Chicago specific term - SASS stands for Screening, Assessment, and Support Services. Other communities have something similar with different names. The betrayal that results from someone who claims to be helpful after you’ve just been sexually assaulted, for example, and then arranges for your unconsented admission to a psych hospital makes it difficult for every supportive person who tries to help later.

This video to the song “Institutionalized” from a while ago is loved by many youth I know and have worked with in the past.

So you might have missed some of the faster lyrics.

They say they’re gonna fix my brain
Alleviate my suffering and my pain
But by the time they fix my head
Mentally I’ll be dead

I’m not crazy (being institutionalized)
You’re the one who’s crazy (being institutionalized)
You’re driving me crazy (being institutionalized)

They stuck me in an institution
Said it was the only solution
To give me the needed professional help
To protect me from the enemy, myself

We need more safer places for youth to live and grow. I’m not convinced by nicer looking hospitals. I’m not convinced by the fact that I’ve met some very kind staff members at inpatient and day treatment programs. I’m not convinced that the need of a few youth who are seriously trying to take their lives justifies this practice. I would argue furthermore that a psych hospital is the last place someone who is suicidal would benefit from. We can be so much more creative and meaningful in our solutions to the emotional health needs of youth in the sex trade.