Street Kids: The Tragedy of Canada's Runaways

By Marlene Webber

Book Overview

In cities across North America, teenage runaways are struggling to stay alive. Some don't make it to adulthood. Some do, but their lives rarely rise above the despair that brought them to the streets in the first place. A few manage to beat the street, to get their lives back on track. In this disturbing account Marlene Webber draws on extensive interviews with these kids to explore the realities of street life, its attraction, and its consequences.

Street kids like to project an image of themselves as free-wheeling rebels who relish life on the wild side. All brashness and bombast, they strut around inner cities panhandling, posturing, and prostituting themselves. Labelled society's bad boys and girls, they often live up to their image. But as sixteen-year-old Eugene tells us, the street forces bravado on homeless adolescents, 'but underneath, a lot of kids are plenty scared.' Eugene is only one of many street kids who talked to Webber in major cities across Canada. She lets her subjects tell their own stories; their voices are sometimes brave, sometimes bitter, often heartbreaking.

Webber cuts a comprehensible path through the tangle of forces, including family breakdown and social-service failure, that accelerate the tragedy of Canada's runaways. She suggests measures that might help more of them beat the streets.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802067050
• ISBN13: 9780802067050
• Release Date: April 1991
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Length: 261 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Street Kids: Is there hope?

This book was amazing! I loved the real life examples and just how truthful it really was. Street Kids shows how hard it is to be a teen on the streets and how it isn't just 'get up and live life on the streets'. Life on the streets is not easy; food is hard to come by, drugs are hard to give up and sex is almost the only to make some kind of income. There's pressure; there's danger there's dismal hope for a future and this book lets people know that. As a reader, I became more aware of just how serious the problem with Canada's runaways is.... well done Marlene Webber!