Sources and References

This document synthesizes scholarship on at-risk youth from multiple disciplinary traditions. Key sources include Julian Tanner’s work on youth deviance and social inequality in Canada; Stephen Gaetz and colleagues’ research on youth homelessness through the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness; Kimberly Schonert-Reichl’s studies on resilience and social-emotional development; Michael Ungar’s international research program on resilience across cultures; Ann Masten’s foundational work on “ordinary magic” and developmental resilience; reports from the Public Health Agency of Canada on adolescent health; Beth Blue Swadener’s critique of deficit framing and the “at-promise” reframing; Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development; the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) reports on youth mental health in Ontario; Egale Canada’s national climate survey on homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in schools; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action; the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls; and additional scholarship in critical youth studies, critical race theory, social determinants of health, and community-based intervention research. Where relevant, international comparative perspectives supplement the Canadian focus.

Chapter 1: Defining “At-Risk” Youth

1.1 The Concept of Risk in Youth Studies

The term at-risk youth (高危青年) has become ubiquitous in social policy, education, and public health discourse, yet it carries significant conceptual baggage that demands careful scrutiny. At its broadest, the label designates young people whose life circumstances elevate the probability of negative developmental outcomes, including school failure, delinquency, substance dependence, homelessness, and compromised physical or mental health. The phrase gained traction in North American policy circles during the 1980s and 1990s, partly as a replacement for more explicitly stigmatizing language such as “delinquent” or “deviant,” though critics note that it merely relocates the stigma rather than eliminating it.

A central tension in the scholarship concerns whether risk inheres in the individual or in the social structures surrounding the individual. Early formulations tended toward individual-deficit models, cataloguing personal attributes — low impulse control, poor academic performance, family dysfunction — as the primary sources of risk. More recent sociological approaches insist on locating risk within broader systems of structural violence (结构性暴力), economic inequality, colonialism, and institutional exclusion. This shift is not merely semantic; it determines whether policy responses aim to “fix” young people or to transform the conditions that produce vulnerability.

1.2 Critical Perspectives on the “At-Risk” Label

The seemingly neutral language of “at-risk” has itself become an object of sustained scholarly critique. Beth Blue Swadener’s influential work challenged the deficit framing embedded in the label, proposing instead the concept of “at-promise” youth (有潜力的青年) — a reorientation that begins from the capacities, aspirations, and cultural wealth of young people rather than from a catalogue of their presumed deficiencies. Swadener and her colleagues argued that the “at-risk” designation functions as a form of symbolic violence, transforming the structural failures of institutions into individual pathologies attributed to young people and their families. The communities most frequently labelled “at-risk” — Indigenous communities, Black communities, immigrant communities, communities in poverty — are precisely those that have been most systematically denied access to resources by state and market institutions. The label thus performs a double erasure: it obscures the structural origins of vulnerability while simultaneously marking certain populations as inherently deficient.

Labeling theory (标签理论), rooted in the symbolic interactionist tradition of Howard Becker and Edwin Lemert, provides a theoretical apparatus for understanding how the “at-risk” designation can become self-fulfilling. When institutions — schools, child welfare agencies, police, courts — classify a young person as “at-risk,” that classification shapes the institutional responses the youth encounters: heightened surveillance, lower academic expectations, more punitive discipline, faster referral to specialized services. These responses, in turn, constrain the youth’s opportunities and reinforce the very behaviours and outcomes the label was meant to predict. Lemert’s distinction between primary deviance (初级偏差) — the initial rule-breaking that may be situational, transient, and normative — and secondary deviance (次级偏差) — the stable deviant identity that emerges through social reaction — illuminates the process by which institutional labelling transforms temporary difficulties into entrenched trajectories.

The deficit-versus-strength debate also intersects with questions of cultural wealth (文化财富). Tara Yosso’s concept of community cultural wealth, developed in the context of critical race theory, identifies six forms of capital that marginalized communities possess — aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial, and resistant capital — that are systematically devalued by dominant institutions. Recognizing these forms of wealth does not deny the reality of structural barriers but insists that young people from marginalized communities are not empty vessels awaiting institutional rescue; they are active agents drawing on rich cultural resources.

1.3 Who Counts as “Youth”?

Definitions of youth vary across legal, developmental, and cultural frameworks. The United Nations defines youth as persons aged 15 to 24, while the Canadian government’s Youth Employment Strategy targets those aged 15 to 30. The Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) applies to individuals aged 12 to 17 at the time of the offence. Developmental psychology recognizes that adolescence now extends well into the mid-twenties, with emerging adulthood (roughly ages 18 to 25) constituting a distinct life stage characterized by identity exploration, instability, and incomplete transitions to adult social roles.

For the sociology of at-risk youth, rigid age boundaries are less important than the recognition that youth is a socially constructed category whose boundaries are shaped by class, race, gender, and institutional context. A 16-year-old living independently after aging out of foster care occupies a fundamentally different social position from a 16-year-old in a stable middle-class household, even though both fall within conventional age ranges.

1.4 Prevalence and Scope in Canada

Estimating the number of at-risk youth in Canada is complicated by definitional inconsistency and data fragmentation. However, several indicators point to the scale of the issue:

• Approximately 35,000 to 40,000 young people experience homelessness on any given night in Canada, according to estimates from the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness.
• In 2019, roughly 1 in 5 Canadian children and youth lived in households below the after-tax Low Income Measure (LIM-AT).
• Youth aged 15 to 24 report the highest rates of mental health disorders of any age group, with anxiety and depression being particularly prevalent.
• Indigenous youth are dramatically overrepresented in child welfare, criminal justice, and homelessness statistics relative to their share of the population.
• Approximately 62,000 children and youth are in some form of out-of-home care across Canada at any given time, with Indigenous children constituting over half of all children in care despite representing less than 8 percent of the child population.

These figures, while imprecise, underscore that vulnerability among young Canadians is not a marginal phenomenon but a systemic one, rooted in the country’s political economy and its legacies of colonialism.

Chapter 2: Theoretical Frameworks

2.1 Risk and Protective Factors

The risk and protective factors (风险与保护因素) framework, which emerged from developmental psychopathology and public health epidemiology, organizes the determinants of youth outcomes into two broad categories. Risk factors are conditions or experiences that increase the probability of negative outcomes; protective factors are those that buffer against risk or promote positive adaptation despite adversity.

The framework’s strength lies in its empirical grounding and its capacity to inform targeted prevention programs. Its limitation is a tendency toward additive, checklist-style thinking: the more risk factors, the worse the prognosis; the more protective factors, the better. This approach can obscure the qualitative differences between risk factors and the ways in which they interact dynamically across developmental time. A single risk factor — such as the loss of a parent — may have profoundly different consequences depending on the cultural, economic, and relational context in which it occurs.

Canadian-specific data on risk and protective factors underscore the uneven distribution of both across population groups. The Public Health Agency of Canada’s reports on the health of young Canadians consistently identify income inequality, food insecurity, inadequate housing, and experiences of discrimination as major risk factors. Protective factors with strong Canadian evidence include participation in organized extracurricular activities, connection to cultural or spiritual communities, access to a family physician, and the presence of at least one stable, caring adult relationship. Notably, many protective factors are not individual attributes but features of the social environment — a finding that reinforces the ecological and structural emphasis of contemporary scholarship.

2.2 Ecological Systems Theory

Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model (生态系统模型) provides a more architecturally sophisticated framework for understanding youth development. Bronfenbrenner’s mature formulation — the bioecological model — posits that development occurs within a series of nested environmental systems, and that the engine of development is the proximal process: the sustained, progressively more complex reciprocal interactions between a developing person and the persons, objects, and symbols in their immediate environment. The model identifies five interlocking systems:

• Microsystem (微系统): The immediate settings in which the young person participates directly — family, peer group, school, neighbourhood. The quality and character of proximal processes within these settings — whether a parent reads to a child, whether a teacher provides individualized feedback, whether a peer group models prosocial or antisocial behaviour — are the most direct drivers of development.
• Mesosystem (中系统): The connections and interactions between microsystems — for example, the relationship between a youth’s family and their school. When these connections are strong, consistent, and mutually reinforcing, development is facilitated; when they are weak, contradictory, or hostile, the young person must navigate conflicting demands with limited support.
• Exosystem (外系统): Settings that affect the young person indirectly — a parent’s workplace, local government decisions about funding for youth services, school board policies. A factory closure that eliminates a parent’s employment, for instance, transforms the family microsystem without the young person ever entering the factory.
• Macrosystem (宏系统): The overarching cultural, economic, and political structures — capitalism, colonialism, prevailing ideologies about youth and deviance. The macrosystem establishes the broad parameters within which all other systems operate: it determines which social arrangements are considered normal, which policies are politically imaginable, and which populations are deemed worthy of investment.
• Chronosystem (时间系统): The dimension of time, encompassing both individual life transitions (the onset of puberty, the transition out of foster care, the death of a parent) and historical change (the 2008 financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, the COVID-19 pandemic). The same risk factor may have vastly different consequences depending on the developmental timing at which it occurs and the historical period in which the young person is growing up.

2.3 Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory (批判种族理论), originating in legal scholarship and extended into sociology and education, provides essential analytical tools for understanding the racialized distribution of risk among Canadian youth. CRT’s core tenets — that racism is not aberrant but ordinary in societies structured by white supremacy, that racial categories are socially constructed yet materially consequential, that legal and institutional structures reproduce racial hierarchy even in the absence of overtly racist intent, and that the experiential knowledge of people of colour is epistemologically valuable — have direct bearing on the study of at-risk youth.

In the Canadian context, CRT illuminates how institutions such as schools, child welfare agencies, and the justice system produce racially disparate outcomes through ostensibly race-neutral mechanisms. “Colour-blind” policies — standardized testing, zero-tolerance discipline, risk assessment instruments — can function as instruments of racial exclusion precisely because they operate within and upon a social field already structured by racial inequality. The concept of interest convergence (利益趋同), articulated by Derrick Bell, helps explain why reforms benefiting racialized youth tend to occur primarily when they also serve the interests of dominant groups, and why such reforms are often partial, temporary, or symbolic.

For Indigenous youth specifically, CRT intersects with settler colonial theory to emphasize that the structures producing Indigenous vulnerability are not residual legacies of a past colonialism but ongoing, active processes of dispossession and elimination. This theoretical framing insists that interventions addressing Indigenous youth must go beyond service provision to challenge the colonial structures that continue to operate through child welfare, education, and criminal justice systems.

2.4 Intersectionality

Intersectionality (交叉性), a theoretical framework originating in Black feminist scholarship and articulated most influentially by Kimberle Crenshaw, holds that social categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and Indigeneity do not operate independently but intersect to produce distinctive configurations of privilege and oppression. For the study of at-risk youth, intersectionality demands attention to the ways in which risk is unevenly distributed across social locations.

A young Indigenous woman navigating the child welfare system, for example, faces risks that cannot be adequately captured by examining Indigeneity, gender, and poverty in isolation. The intersection of these dimensions produces specific forms of vulnerability — including heightened exposure to violence, sexual exploitation, and the intergenerational effects of residential schooling — that are qualitatively distinct from the sum of their parts.

2.5 Social Determinants of Health

The social determinants of health (健康的社会决定因素) framework, championed by the World Health Organization and adapted to the Canadian context by scholars such as Dennis Raphael, identifies the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age as the primary drivers of health outcomes. For youth, the most salient determinants include income and social status, education, employment and working conditions, food security, housing, social inclusion and exclusion, access to health services, Indigenous status, gender, and race.

This framework directly challenges biomedical models that locate health and illness primarily within individual bodies and behaviours. It positions the health disparities experienced by at-risk youth as products of unjust social arrangements rather than personal failings, and it points toward upstream, structural interventions — poverty reduction, affordable housing, anti-racism — as the most effective health promotion strategies.

2.6 Labelling Theory and the Social Construction of Deviance

Drawing on the symbolic interactionist tradition, labelling theory (标签理论) argues that deviance is not an inherent property of behaviour but a consequence of the application of social rules and sanctions by others. Howard Becker’s foundational insight — that “deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label” — has profound implications for understanding at-risk youth. The very act of designating a young person as “at-risk,” “delinquent,” or “troubled” can set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the label becomes internalized and shapes subsequent identity and behaviour.

Julian Tanner’s work on youth and deviance in Canada demonstrates how institutional labelling processes — particularly within the education and criminal justice systems — disproportionately target racialized and economically marginalized youth, thereby reproducing the very inequalities that generate risk in the first place. Erving Goffman’s concept of stigma (污名) further illuminates how labelled youth manage spoiled identities, adopting strategies of concealment, withdrawal, or defiant embrace that shape their trajectories through institutional systems.

Chapter 3: Youth Homelessness in Canada

3.1 Scope and Definitions

Homelessness (无家可归) among youth represents one of the most visible and urgent manifestations of social exclusion in Canada. Stephen Gaetz and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness define youth homelessness as the situation of a young person between the ages of 13 and 24 who is living independently of parents or caregivers and lacks the means or ability to acquire a stable, safe, and consistent residence. This definition encompasses a continuum of housing instability:

• Absolute homelessness: Living on the street, in emergency shelters, or in places not designed for habitation.
• Hidden homelessness: Staying temporarily with others (“couch-surfing”), in motels, or in other precarious arrangements without security of tenure.
• At risk of homelessness: Precariously housed, facing imminent loss of housing, or living in conditions that are unsafe or inadequate.

3.2 Pathways into Homelessness

Research consistently identifies several primary pathways through which young people become homeless in Canada:

Family conflict and breakdown remains the single most commonly cited precipitant, encompassing physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, parental substance use, and rejection based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Studies by Gaetz and colleagues indicate that approximately two-thirds of homeless youth report some form of family violence or neglect.

Child welfare system involvement constitutes a major structural pathway. Youth who have been in foster care or group homes are dramatically overrepresented among the homeless youth population. The transition out of care — often occurring abruptly at age 18 or 19, with minimal preparation or ongoing support — represents a critical juncture at which many young people fall into homelessness. Research estimates that between 40 and 50 percent of homeless youth in Canada have had some involvement with the child welfare system, making it one of the most significant institutional contributors to youth homelessness.

LGBTQ+ rejection represents a distinct and devastating pathway. LGBTQ+ youth who are rejected by their families on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity constitute between 25 and 40 percent of homeless youth populations in Canadian cities, a figure dramatically disproportionate to their share of the general youth population. The intersection of family rejection, school-based harassment, and the absence of affirming services creates a cascade of vulnerability that often leads to prolonged periods of housing instability.

Poverty and economic marginalization form the structural backdrop against which individual-level triggers operate. Families living in deep poverty often lack the resources to absorb shocks — job loss, illness, relationship breakdown — that would be manageable for more affluent households.

Mental health challenges and substance use both contribute to and are exacerbated by homelessness, creating vicious cycles that are extremely difficult to interrupt without comprehensive, integrated services.

3.3 The Canadian Shelter System and Its Limitations

The emergency shelter system (紧急庇护所系统) serving homeless youth in Canada varies enormously by jurisdiction and is unevenly distributed geographically. Major urban centres such as Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary have dedicated youth shelters, though demand routinely exceeds capacity. In smaller cities, rural areas, and northern communities, dedicated youth shelter beds are scarce or non-existent, leaving young people to access adult shelters — environments often experienced as unsafe and inappropriate for adolescents.

Canadian youth shelters typically operate on a short-term, emergency model, offering a bed, meals, and basic services for limited periods (often 30 to 90 days). While these services are essential for immediate crisis response, they do not address the underlying causes of homelessness and can inadvertently institutionalize youth within a cycle of shelter stays. The shelter environment itself carries risks: exposure to substance use, recruitment by exploitative adults, loss of connection to school and community, and the stigma associated with shelter use. Research has documented that many youth — particularly young women, LGBTQ+ youth, and Indigenous youth — actively avoid shelters due to experiences of harassment, discrimination, or victimization within them, choosing instead the dangers of couch-surfing or sleeping rough.

3.4 Experiences of Homeless Youth

Life on the street or in the shelter system exposes young people to an array of further harms. Research documents elevated rates of physical and sexual victimization, engagement in survival strategies such as panhandling, sex work, and petty crime, deteriorating physical and mental health, social isolation, and interactions with the criminal justice system that produce records impeding future employment and housing access.

3.5 Responses and Interventions

Canadian responses to youth homelessness have evolved considerably over the past two decades, moving from emergency-focused models (shelters, drop-in centres) toward more systemic approaches:

Housing First for Youth (HF4Y) adapts the evidence-based Housing First model to the specific developmental needs of young people. Rather than requiring youth to demonstrate “housing readiness” through sobriety, employment, or program compliance, HF4Y provides immediate access to stable housing alongside wraparound supports tailored to individual needs. The HF4Y model, articulated by the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, rests on five core principles: immediate access to housing with no preconditions; youth choice in housing type and location; youth-focused, developmentally appropriate supports; community integration and social inclusion; and individualized, client-driven support plans. Canadian evaluations of HF4Y programs in several cities have demonstrated significant improvements in housing stability, with approximately 80 percent of participants maintaining housing at 12-month follow-up.

Prevention-oriented strategies focus on intervening before homelessness occurs, through family mediation, supports for youth transitioning out of care, and early identification of housing instability in school and health settings.

Systems integration attempts to coordinate the fragmented landscape of services — child welfare, mental health, education, justice, income support — that homeless youth must navigate, often with little success given the siloed nature of these systems.

Chapter 4: Poverty, Inequality, and Youth

4.1 Child and Youth Poverty in Canada

Poverty (贫困) among children and youth in Canada persists at rates that are difficult to reconcile with the country’s overall wealth. Despite a unanimous House of Commons resolution in 1989 to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000, subsequent decades saw little sustained progress. The introduction of the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) in 2016 contributed to measurable reductions, yet significant proportions of Canadian children and youth continue to live below recognized poverty thresholds.

Poverty rates are not evenly distributed. Indigenous children, children in lone-parent families (particularly those headed by women), children of recent immigrants, racialized children, and children with disabilities all experience poverty at rates significantly above the national average. This patterned inequality reflects the intersection of economic structures with racial, gender, and colonial hierarchies.

4.2 How Poverty Produces Risk

The mechanisms through which poverty generates risk for young people are multiple, cumulative, and mutually reinforcing:

Material deprivation limits access to adequate nutrition, safe housing, warm clothing, school supplies, extracurricular activities, and the digital technologies increasingly necessary for educational participation. These deprivations have direct consequences for health, cognitive development, and social inclusion.

Neighbourhood effects concentrate poverty in specific geographic areas characterized by under-resourced schools, limited employment opportunities, environmental hazards, inadequate public infrastructure, and higher exposure to violence. The spatial dimension of poverty means that disadvantage is not merely an individual experience but a collective condition embedded in place.

Stress and family functioning: The chronic stress of economic insecurity — the constant calculation of whether there is enough for rent, food, and transportation — takes a measurable toll on parental mental health, relationship quality, and caregiving capacity. Research in developmental neuroscience demonstrates that chronic stress exposure during childhood and adolescence can alter brain architecture, affecting executive function, emotional regulation, and learning.

Social exclusion operates through both material and symbolic dimensions. Youth in poverty are excluded not only from consumer activities that carry social significance among peers (clothing, technology, entertainment) but also from the social networks, cultural capital, and institutional connections that facilitate transitions to post-secondary education and stable employment.

4.3 Precarious Work and Youth Employment

The labour market facing Canadian youth has undergone profound transformation. The growth of precarious employment — part-time, temporary, contract, gig-based work offering low wages, no benefits, and minimal job security — disproportionately affects young workers. For at-risk youth with limited education, criminal records, or unstable housing, access to even precarious work can be difficult, and such work rarely provides a viable pathway out of poverty.

The erosion of the standard employment relationship has particular consequences for young people’s capacity to achieve the markers of adulthood — independent housing, financial stability, family formation — that earlier generations could more readily attain through entry-level employment in manufacturing and other sectors.

Chapter 5: Mental Health and Substance Use

5.1 Youth Mental Health in Canada

Mental health (心理健康) challenges among Canadian youth have attracted increasing public attention, driven partly by epidemiological data showing rising rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm, and partly by growing recognition that mental health is inextricable from the social conditions in which young people develop.

The Public Health Agency of Canada reports that approximately 10 to 20 percent of Canadian youth are affected by mental illness or disorder, and suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth aged 15 to 24. However, these aggregate figures conceal enormous variation across social groups. Indigenous youth, LGBTQ+ youth, youth in care, and youth experiencing homelessness all report mental health challenges at rates substantially above population averages.

5.2 The Waitlist Crisis and Service Gaps

Data from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) (成瘾与心理健康中心) and Children’s Mental Health Ontario reveal that Canadian youth face severe barriers to accessing mental health services. Wait times for publicly funded child and youth mental health services routinely exceed six months and can extend to over a year in many jurisdictions. An estimated 75 percent of children and youth with mental health disorders do not receive specialized treatment services. The waitlist crisis is not a simple problem of insufficient supply; it reflects systemic underinvestment in child and youth mental health relative to adult services, the fragmentation of service delivery across health, education, and social service sectors, and the geographic maldistribution of providers that leaves rural and northern communities with virtually no access to specialized care.

School-based mental health programs have emerged as a partial response to these access barriers, embedding mental health promotion, early identification, and intervention within the educational settings where young people spend much of their time. Programs such as the Ontario Ministry of Education’s School Mental Health Ontario initiative train educators to recognize signs of distress, implement evidence-based classroom strategies for social-emotional learning, and facilitate referrals to more intensive services. Research on school-based approaches suggests they can reduce stigma, increase help-seeking behaviour, and improve mental health literacy among students, though they are not a substitute for the specialized clinical services that many youth require.

Integrated youth services hubs represent another innovation. Foundry in British Columbia, ACCESS Open Minds in Quebec, and Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario provide walk-in access to mental health, substance use, primary care, and social services in youth-friendly community settings, significantly reducing the barriers posed by wait times, bureaucratic intake processes, and the fragmentation of traditional service systems.

5.3 Structural Determinants of Youth Mental Health

A sociological approach to youth mental health moves beyond clinical and individualistic frameworks to examine the structural conditions that shape psychological well-being:

Poverty and economic insecurity are among the most robust predictors of poor mental health across the lifespan, and their effects are particularly pronounced during the developmental sensitivity of adolescence.

Racism and discrimination produce chronic stress — what scholars term racial battle fatigue — that accumulates over time and erodes psychological well-being. For Indigenous youth, the intergenerational trauma of colonialism, residential schooling, and the Sixties Scoop constitutes a specific and devastating pathway to mental health distress.

Social media and digital environments have introduced new dimensions of social comparison, cyberbullying, and performative pressure that appear to contribute to rising rates of anxiety and depression among youth, though the precise magnitude and mechanisms of these effects remain subjects of active research.

Educational pressure and the credential economy create intense competitive stress, particularly for youth navigating the demands of post-secondary education amid financial precarity.

5.4 Indigenous-Specific Approaches to Mental Health

Conventional Western clinical models of mental health — individualistic, diagnosis-focused, office-based — are frequently experienced by Indigenous youth as culturally alien, inaccessible, or retraumatizing. In response, Indigenous communities and scholars have developed and advocated for approaches grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems. Land-based healing (基于土地的疗愈) programs take youth onto the land to engage in traditional activities — hunting, trapping, fishing, berry-picking, camping, canoeing — under the guidance of Elders and knowledge keepers. These programs address mental health not as an individual clinical condition but as a dimension of overall well-being that is inseparable from connection to land, culture, language, community, and spirituality.

The medicine wheel (药轮) framework, used by many First Nations communities, conceptualizes well-being as the balance among four interconnected dimensions — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual — and provides a holistic model that stands in contrast to the compartmentalized approach of Western biomedical systems. Programs organized around the medicine wheel address mental health by simultaneously attending to physical activity and nutrition, emotional expression and relational connection, cognitive engagement and education, and spiritual practice and cultural identity.

Research on land-based and culturally grounded programs for Indigenous youth has documented improvements in self-esteem, cultural identity, social connectedness, and mental health indicators, as well as reductions in substance use and suicidal ideation. Critically, these programs are most effective when they are designed and led by Indigenous communities themselves rather than imposed by external agencies.

5.5 Substance Use Among Youth

Substance use (物质使用) among youth ranges from normative experimentation to patterns of dependence that carry serious health and social consequences. Canadian data indicate that cannabis, alcohol, and nicotine (including vaping products) are the most commonly used substances among youth, with smaller but significant minorities using opioids, stimulants, and other drugs.

The sociology of youth substance use emphasizes several key points that distinguish it from purely clinical or pharmacological perspectives:

Social context shapes substance use patterns. The substances available, the norms governing their use, the social meanings attached to intoxication, and the consequences of detection all vary by class, race, geography, and subculture. The same behaviour — cannabis use, for example — carries vastly different risks depending on whether the user is a middle-class white youth in a university residence or a racialized youth in a neighbourhood subject to intensive policing.

Substance use exists on a continuum. The majority of youth who experiment with substances do not develop problematic patterns of use. Conflating experimentation with addiction stigmatizes normative adolescent behaviour and diverts attention from the smaller population that does experience serious harm.

The “war on drugs” framework has failed youth. Criminalization of substance use has produced mass incarceration, particularly of racialized and Indigenous youth, without achieving meaningful reductions in use. Harm reduction approaches — which prioritize minimizing the negative consequences of use rather than demanding abstinence — have gained ground as more effective and ethically defensible alternatives.

5.6 Harm Reduction, Cannabis Legalization, and the Fentanyl Crisis

Harm reduction (减害) philosophy and practice have become increasingly central to Canadian drug policy, though their application to youth remains contested. Harm reduction encompasses a spectrum of interventions — needle exchange programs, naloxone distribution, drug checking services, safer supply programs, and supervised consumption sites — all grounded in the pragmatic recognition that abstinence-only approaches fail many people who use drugs, and that reducing the harms associated with use (overdose death, infectious disease, social marginalization) is a legitimate and achievable public health objective.

Supervised consumption sites (安全注射站), such as Insite in Vancouver, have generated robust evidence of effectiveness in reducing overdose deaths, facilitating referrals to treatment, and decreasing public drug use, yet they remain politically controversial. Youth-specific supervised consumption services are rare, raising questions about age-appropriate harm reduction strategies that balance safety with developmental considerations.

The legalization of cannabis in Canada in 2018 represented a watershed moment in drug policy, framed partly as a youth protection measure: by regulating the market, the government aimed to reduce youth access and eliminate the criminal consequences of possession. Early evidence on the impact of legalization on youth use is mixed. Some surveys suggest stable or slightly declining rates of cannabis use among youth post-legalization, while others indicate increased normalization and earlier onset of use in some subpopulations. The regulatory framework — including age restrictions, THC limits on edibles, and restrictions on marketing to youth — reflects an attempt to balance adult autonomy with youth protection, though enforcement remains inconsistent.

The fentanyl crisis (芬太尼危机) has brought devastating harm to Canadian youth, particularly in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario. The contamination of the illicit drug supply with fentanyl and its analogues has made every instance of illicit drug use potentially lethal, transforming the risk landscape for young people who use drugs. Youth experiencing homelessness, involvement in the justice system, or untreated mental health conditions face the highest risk. The crisis has catalyzed expanded naloxone distribution, drug checking services, and calls for safer supply programs, but has also exposed the profound limitations of an emergency response framework in the face of what is fundamentally a crisis rooted in the social determinants of health.

5.7 Co-occurring Disorders and Integrated Services

The co-occurrence of mental health and substance use challenges — sometimes termed concurrent disorders (共病) — is extremely common among at-risk youth, yet the service systems designed to address these issues have historically operated in silos, with mental health services requiring sobriety as a precondition for treatment and addiction services lacking capacity to address underlying psychiatric conditions.

Integrated service models that address mental health, substance use, housing, and social support simultaneously have demonstrated greater effectiveness than sequential or parallel approaches. Initiatives such as Foundry in British Columbia and ACCESS Open Minds exemplify efforts to provide integrated, youth-friendly services in community-based settings.

Chapter 6: Youth and the Justice System

6.1 The Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA)

Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) (《青少年刑事司法法》), enacted in 2003, replaced the Young Offenders Act and represents a legislative attempt to balance accountability, rehabilitation, and diversion for young people aged 12 to 17 who come into conflict with the law. Key principles of the YCJA include:

• The justice system for youth must be separate from that of adults and must emphasize rehabilitation and reintegration.
• Extrajudicial measures (法外措施) (warnings, cautions, referrals to community programs) should be used for less serious offences, reflecting the principle that the least restrictive intervention consistent with public safety is the most appropriate response to youth offending.
• The principle of proportionality (比例原则) requires that the consequences imposed on a young person be proportionate to the seriousness of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the young person.
• Custody should be reserved for the most serious offences and should be used as a last resort.
• The privacy of young persons must be protected through publication bans and restricted access to records.
• The Act explicitly recognizes the need for enhanced procedural protections for young persons, including the right to counsel, the right to have a parent or adult present during questioning, and limitations on the use of statements obtained from young persons.

The extrajudicial measures provisions of the YCJA deserve particular attention because they represent the Act’s most distinctive innovation. Police officers are given broad discretion to issue warnings, administer cautions, or refer youth to community-based programs rather than laying charges. Extrajudicial sanctions — more formal diversion programs that may involve community service, restitution, or participation in restorative processes — are available for youth who have committed offences too serious for informal measures but not serious enough to warrant court prosecution. Research indicates that these provisions have been effective in reducing the number of youth entering the formal court system, contributing to a significant decline in youth incarceration rates since the Act’s implementation.

6.2 Overrepresentation of Indigenous and Racialized Youth

The overrepresentation (过度代表) of Indigenous and racialized youth in the Canadian justice system constitutes one of the most troubling manifestations of structural inequality. Indigenous youth, who represent approximately 8 percent of the Canadian youth population, account for roughly 50 percent of youth admissions to correctional services in some provinces. Black youth in Ontario face elevated rates of police stops, charges, and incarceration relative to their population share.

These patterns cannot be explained by differential rates of offending alone. Research consistently demonstrates that discretionary decisions at every stage of the justice process — police contact, charging, bail, sentencing, release — are shaped by racial bias, both explicit and implicit. The concept of systemic racism (系统性种族主义) captures the way in which these biases are embedded not in the attitudes of individual actors alone but in institutional practices, policies, and cultures.

6.3 Gladue Principles and Indigenous Youth

The Gladue principles (格拉杜原则), derived from the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1999 decision in R. v. Gladue and the subsequent R. v. Ipeelee decision, require sentencing judges to consider the unique systemic or background factors that may have played a role in bringing an Indigenous person before the court, and to consider all available sanctions other than imprisonment that are reasonable in the circumstances. While Gladue applies to adults under the Criminal Code, its principles are incorporated into the YCJA’s sentencing framework for Indigenous youth. A Gladue report (格拉杜报告) provides the court with detailed information about the Indigenous person’s life circumstances, including the impacts of colonialism, residential schooling, foster care involvement, community dislocation, poverty, and intergenerational trauma.

Despite the Gladue framework, Indigenous youth incarceration rates have continued to rise in several provinces since the decision. Critics argue that Gladue reports, while valuable, cannot compensate for the systemic factors — inadequate community resources, underfunded diversion programs on reserves, racially biased policing practices — that funnel Indigenous youth into the justice system in the first place. The structural conditions that produce Indigenous overrepresentation require structural remedies that go far beyond sentencing reform.

6.4 Criminalization of Survival

Many of the behaviours for which at-risk youth encounter the justice system are directly connected to their survival circumstances. Panhandling, trespassing (sleeping in public spaces), shoplifting food, fare evasion on public transit, and drug possession for personal use are activities that criminalize the conditions of poverty and homelessness rather than genuine threats to public safety. The concept of criminalization of poverty (贫穷的犯罪化) draws attention to the ways in which the justice system functions as a mechanism for managing and controlling marginalized populations rather than promoting safety.

6.5 Restorative Justice and Diversion

Restorative justice (修复性司法) approaches, which centre the repair of harm to victims and communities rather than the punishment of offenders, have gained considerable traction in Canadian youth justice. Programs such as victim-offender mediation, community conferences, and circle sentencing (drawing on Indigenous justice traditions) offer alternatives to conventional court processing that can be more meaningful for all parties involved.

Circle sentencing (圆圈审判), rooted in Indigenous justice traditions, brings together the offender, the victim, family and community members, Elders, and justice officials in a circle process that seeks consensus on an appropriate response to the offence. The process addresses not only the immediate offence but also the underlying circumstances — including colonial trauma, community dislocation, and systemic disadvantage — that contributed to the behaviour. Circle sentencing has shown particular promise for Indigenous youth, for whom the conventional adversarial court process can be alienating, intimidating, and culturally inappropriate.

Diversion programs, which redirect youth away from the formal justice system and into community-based supports, have been shown to reduce recidivism more effectively than incarceration, particularly for youth whose offending is connected to untreated mental health challenges, substance use, or unstable housing.

Chapter 7: Education and At-Risk Youth

7.1 The Promise and Failure of Education

Education is routinely invoked as the primary vehicle for social mobility and the most powerful protective factor available to disadvantaged youth. While there is genuine evidence that educational attainment is associated with better employment, health, and social outcomes, the relationship is far more complex than popular discourse acknowledges. For many at-risk youth, the education system is not a site of opportunity but a site of exclusion, discipline, and failure.

7.2 Dropping Out and Pushing Out

The phenomenon conventionally described as dropping out (辍学) is better understood, in many cases, as being “pushed out.” Research by Tanner and others demonstrates that the youth who leave school before graduation are disproportionately those who have experienced poverty, family disruption, disability, racialization, and disciplinary exclusion. Their departure from school is less a voluntary withdrawal than the culmination of a process in which the institution has systematically failed to meet their needs.

Suspension, expulsion, and other forms of exclusionary discipline — collectively termed the school-to-prison pipeline (从学校到监狱的管道) — remove youth from educational environments and increase their exposure to the street and justice system. Research consistently shows that Black youth, Indigenous youth, and youth with disabilities are subjected to exclusionary discipline at rates far exceeding those of their white, non-disabled peers.

7.3 Streaming, Tracking, and Zero-Tolerance Policies

Academic streaming (分流/分轨) — the practice of sorting students into different curricular tracks (e.g., “academic” versus “applied” or “general” in Ontario’s secondary school system) — has been extensively criticized for reproducing class and racial inequalities within the education system. Research consistently demonstrates that students streamed into lower tracks are disproportionately from low-income families, racialized communities, and Indigenous backgrounds. Once assigned to a lower track, students receive a less rigorous curriculum, have access to fewer qualified teachers, develop lower educational aspirations, and face diminished prospects for post-secondary education. The streaming decision, typically made in Grade 8 or 9, thus has cascading consequences that shape the entire trajectory of a young person’s educational and occupational life. Ontario’s decision to begin destreaming Grade 9 courses in 2022 represents a recognition of these harms, though the effectiveness of destreaming depends on accompanying supports such as teacher training, resource allocation, and cultural change within schools.

Zero-tolerance policies (零容忍政策), which mandate predetermined consequences (typically suspension or expulsion) for specific behaviours regardless of context or circumstances, have been widely adopted in Canadian schools despite a substantial body of evidence that they are ineffective in improving school safety and disproportionately punish racialized and disabled students. The Ontario Safe Schools Act of 2000, which introduced mandatory suspension and expulsion provisions, was amended in 2007 after research documented its discriminatory impact on Black, Indigenous, and disabled students. However, discretionary disciplinary practices continue to produce similar patterns of racial disproportionality, suggesting that the problem lies not merely in formal policy but in the institutional cultures and implicit biases that shape day-to-day disciplinary decisions.

7.4 Alternative Education and Re-engagement

For youth who have been disconnected from mainstream education, alternative and re-engagement programs offer potential pathways back. These include alternative schools, continuing education programs, Indigenous-led education initiatives, and community-based learning centres. The most effective programs share several characteristics: small class sizes, flexible scheduling, culturally relevant curriculum, integrated social supports (mental health, housing, food), trauma-informed pedagogy, and genuine respect for students’ knowledge and experience.

Chapter 8: Health Disparities and At-Risk Youth

8.1 Physical Health

At-risk youth experience physical health disparities across virtually every measurable dimension. These include higher rates of injury, infectious disease (including sexually transmitted infections and, among street-involved youth, hepatitis C and HIV), respiratory illness, dental disease, nutritional deficiencies, and chronic conditions linked to early-life adversity. The concept of health equity (健康公平) demands attention to these patterned disparities as products of unjust social arrangements rather than individual behaviour.

Food insecurity is a particularly pressing concern. Youth experiencing homelessness or deep poverty frequently lack reliable access to sufficient, nutritious food, with cascading consequences for physical health, cognitive function, and emotional well-being. Food bank use among Canadian youth has risen markedly in recent years, reflecting broader trends in income inequality and the erosion of the social safety net.

8.2 Sexual and Reproductive Health

At-risk youth face distinct sexual and reproductive health challenges. Limited access to comprehensive, non-judgmental sexual health education and services, combined with social norms that stigmatize help-seeking, leaves many young people without the information and resources necessary for healthy sexual development. Street-involved youth and youth in the sex trade face extreme risks, including sexual exploitation, violence, and unintended pregnancy.

8.3 Access to Healthcare

Structural barriers to healthcare access compound the health challenges faced by at-risk youth. These barriers include lack of a provincial health card (common among homeless youth and youth without stable identification), inability to navigate complex bureaucratic systems, transportation costs, long wait times for mental health and addiction services, past negative experiences with healthcare providers, and the absence of youth-friendly service delivery models.

Chapter 9: Indigenous Youth

9.1 Historical Context: Colonialism and Its Legacies

Any discussion of Indigenous youth in Canada must begin with the recognition that the vulnerabilities they face are not natural or accidental but are the direct products of colonialism — a centuries-long project of dispossession, cultural destruction, and institutional violence. The residential school system (寄宿学校制度), which operated from the 1880s to 1996, forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families and communities with the explicit goal of eliminating Indigenous languages, cultures, and identities. The intergenerational trauma produced by this system — transmitted through disrupted parenting, family fragmentation, community dislocation, and unresolved grief — continues to shape the life circumstances of Indigenous youth today.

The Sixties Scoop, during which Indigenous children were removed from their families and placed in non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes, extended the logic of residential schooling into the child welfare system. Contemporary child welfare practices continue to remove Indigenous children at vastly disproportionate rates, prompting the passage of the An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Metis children, youth and families (2020), which affirms the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to exercise jurisdiction over child and family services.

9.2 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Calls to Action

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) (真相与和解委员会), which delivered its final report in 2015, documented the devastating impacts of the residential school system and issued 94 Calls to Action directed at federal, provincial, and territorial governments, churches, schools, and other institutions. Several Calls to Action are directly relevant to Indigenous youth: Call 1 addresses child welfare reform, including the reduction of Indigenous children in care; Calls 6 through 12 address education, including the elimination of educational and employment gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians; Calls 18 through 24 address health, including the recognition of Indigenous healing practices; and Call 30 addresses the elimination of the overrepresentation of Indigenous youth in custody.

The implementation of the TRC’s Calls to Action has been slow and uneven. Annual monitoring by organizations such as the Yellowhead Institute documents persistent gaps between the government’s stated commitments and actual progress, particularly in areas requiring structural change rather than symbolic gestures. For Indigenous youth, the gap between the TRC’s aspirational language and the material conditions of their daily lives remains wide.

9.3 Jordan’s Principle and Equitable Services

Jordan’s Principle (乔丹原则), named after Jordan River Anderson, a First Nations child from Norway House Cree Nation who died in hospital while the federal and provincial governments disputed financial responsibility for his home care, establishes that the government of first contact must pay for services for First Nations children and seek reimbursement afterward. The principle is intended to ensure that First Nations children do not experience delays, denials, or disruptions in services due to jurisdictional disputes between levels of government. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal’s landmark 2016 ruling found that the federal government had discriminated against First Nations children by underfunding services on reserves and failing to implement Jordan’s Principle, ordering immediate compliance. Despite this ruling, access to services for First Nations children and youth remains uneven, and the principle’s full implementation continues to be a site of advocacy and legal contestation.

9.4 Contemporary Conditions

Indigenous youth in Canada face compounded disadvantages across multiple domains:

• Poverty rates among Indigenous children and youth are roughly double the national average.
• Suicide rates among Inuit youth are among the highest in the world.
• Indigenous youth are dramatically overrepresented in the child welfare and criminal justice systems.
• Many Indigenous communities, particularly in remote and northern regions, lack adequate housing, clean water, healthcare, and educational infrastructure.
• Food insecurity in northern Indigenous communities reaches crisis levels, with grocery costs several times higher than in southern urban centres.

9.5 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) (失踪和被谋杀的原住民妇女和女孩), which reported in 2019, determined that the violence experienced by Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people constitutes a Canadian genocide rooted in colonialism and state complicity. The Inquiry documented the ways in which systems designed to protect — policing, child welfare, healthcare — have instead failed Indigenous women and girls, subjecting them to indifference, racism, and institutional violence. For Indigenous girls and young women, the MMIWG crisis is not an abstract historical problem but a present-day reality that shapes their sense of safety, their relationships with institutions, and their understanding of their place in Canadian society. The Inquiry’s 231 Calls for Justice address structural reforms across the domains of human security, culture, health, and justice, with particular attention to the needs of young Indigenous women and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people.

9.6 Strength, Resistance, and Cultural Revitalization

Despite these conditions, Indigenous youth have been at the forefront of movements for cultural revitalization, political mobilization, and community healing. Language revitalization programs, land-based education initiatives, Indigenous-led mental health and wellness programs, and youth-driven political movements (such as Idle No More, in which young Indigenous people played central roles) represent expressions of resilience (韧性/抗逆力) that are rooted in cultural identity, collective action, and self-determination rather than individual coping.

The medicine wheel framework and Seven Grandfather Teachings provide culturally grounded models of youth development that emphasize the interconnection of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being, and the centrality of values such as wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, and truth. Programs organized around these frameworks — including land-based camps, Elders-in-schools initiatives, and Indigenous-led youth councils — demonstrate that Indigenous approaches to youth well-being are not supplementary to Western models but constitute distinct, coherent, and effective knowledge systems in their own right.

Chapter 10: LGBTQ+ Youth

10.1 Vulnerability and Victimization

LGBTQ+ youth (LGBTQ+青年) — lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two-Spirit, and other sexually and gender-diverse young people — face specific forms of risk rooted in heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and their intersection with other systems of oppression. Canadian research consistently documents that LGBTQ+ youth experience:

• Higher rates of bullying, harassment, and physical violence in schools and communities.
• Elevated risk of family rejection and consequent homelessness; LGBTQ+ youth are significantly overrepresented among homeless youth populations.
• Higher rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidal ideation compared to heterosexual and cisgender peers.
• Greater likelihood of substance use, often as a coping mechanism in the absence of adequate support.

10.2 Egale Canada and National Climate Data

Egale Canada’s national climate survey on homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in Canadian schools provides the most comprehensive data on the school experiences of LGBTQ+ youth in the country. The survey documents that a majority of LGBTQ+ students report hearing homophobic comments daily at school, that approximately two-thirds of LGBTQ+ students feel unsafe at school, and that transgender students face the most severe victimization, with very high rates of verbal and physical harassment. The Egale data also reveal that LGBTQ+ students in schools with Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) (同性恋-异性恋联盟) report feeling significantly safer, hearing fewer homophobic comments, and being more likely to feel that their school communities are supportive, providing strong evidence for the effectiveness of GSAs as a policy intervention.

10.3 Two-Spirit Youth

Two-Spirit (双灵) is a contemporary pan-Indigenous term that references the historical and ongoing existence of gender and sexual diversity within Indigenous cultures. Two-Spirit youth navigate the intersection of Indigenous identity, sexual and gender diversity, and the legacies of colonialism, which actively suppressed Indigenous understandings of gender. Supporting Two-Spirit youth requires approaches that centre Indigenous knowledge systems and challenge both colonial gender norms and the sometimes exclusionary politics of mainstream LGBTQ+ movements.

10.4 Conversion Therapy and the Family Acceptance Project

Canada’s ban on conversion therapy (转化疗法), enacted in 2022 through Criminal Code amendments, prohibits the practice of attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. For LGBTQ+ youth, who were disproportionately subjected to conversion practices — often initiated by families or religious communities — the ban represents a significant legal protection, though enforcement challenges remain, particularly with respect to informal, non-clinical practices that occur within families and religious settings.

The Family Acceptance Project (家庭接纳项目), developed by Caitlin Ryan, provides an evidence-based framework for helping families of LGBTQ+ youth move from rejection toward acceptance. Research from the project demonstrates that family acceptance is one of the single most powerful protective factors for LGBTQ+ youth mental health: highly accepted LGBTQ+ young adults have significantly lower rates of depression, substance use, and suicidal ideation compared to those who experienced high levels of family rejection. The project’s culturally adapted interventions — designed for use with diverse racial, ethnic, and religious communities — provide concrete strategies for clinicians, social workers, and educators working with families of LGBTQ+ youth.

10.5 Creating Affirming Environments

Research identifies several key elements of environments that support LGBTQ+ youth well-being: Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) in schools, which provide peer support and contribute to safer school climates for all students; inclusive curricula that represent diverse sexual orientations and gender identities; affirming family relationships, which are among the strongest protective factors; access to knowledgeable, non-judgmental healthcare providers; and community organizations that provide safe social spaces and mentorship.

Chapter 11: Gender Dimensions of Youth Risk

11.1 Gendered Pathways

The experience of being “at risk” is profoundly shaped by gender (性别). While boys and young men are more likely to be apprehended by police and incarcerated, girls and young women face distinct forms of vulnerability, including sexual exploitation, intimate partner violence, and the burden of unpaid care work in families experiencing crisis. Transgender and non-binary youth face compounded risks related to both gender-based violence and discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

Research on gendered pathways into the justice system demonstrates that girls who offend are significantly more likely than boys to have experienced sexual abuse, to have mental health challenges, and to have engaged in survival-related behaviours (such as running away from abusive home environments) that are subsequently criminalized. The justice system, designed primarily with male offending in mind, often fails to provide gender-responsive programming.

11.2 Masculinity and Risk

Dominant constructions of masculinity (男性气质) contribute to risk for boys and young men in specific ways. The pressure to perform toughness, emotional stoicism, and physical dominance is associated with elevated rates of violence (both perpetration and victimization), risk-taking behaviour, substance use, reluctance to seek help for mental health challenges, and school disengagement. Programs that engage young men in critical reflection on masculinity norms — rather than simply telling them to behave differently — have shown promise in reducing violence and promoting healthier developmental trajectories.

11.3 Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking

The sexual exploitation (性剥削) of youth, which disproportionately affects girls and young women but also targets boys, transgender, and Two-Spirit youth, represents one of the most severe forms of violence experienced by at-risk populations. In Canada, Indigenous girls and young women are particularly vulnerable, reflecting the intersection of colonialism, poverty, racism, and gender-based violence. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls documented the systemic failures — in policing, child welfare, and social services — that have allowed this violence to persist.

Chapter 12: Youth in and Aging Out of Foster Care

12.1 The Child Welfare System and Crown Wards

Approximately 62,000 children and youth are in some form of out-of-home care in Canada at any given time. Among these, Crown wards (皇家监护人) — children and youth who have been made permanent wards of the state, with the government assuming full legal guardianship — face the most precarious circumstances. The child welfare system, designed to protect children from abuse and neglect, too often becomes a source of further instability: multiple placement changes, disrupted schooling, severed relationships with siblings and extended family, and exposure to institutional environments that can be impersonal, under-resourced, and in some cases abusive.

Indigenous children are vastly overrepresented in the child welfare system, constituting over 52 percent of children in foster care while representing approximately 7.7 percent of the child population. This overrepresentation is a direct continuation of the colonial logic of the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop, and it has been recognized as such by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which found in 2016 that the federal government had discriminated against First Nations children by underfunding on-reserve child welfare services.

12.2 Aging Out of Care

The transition out of child welfare — commonly termed aging out (老化退出) — occurs at age 18 or 19 in most Canadian provinces and represents a critical juncture at which many young people experience a sudden and devastating loss of support. Unlike their peers who can rely on family for housing, financial assistance, guidance, and emotional support well into their twenties, youth aging out of care are expected to achieve immediate self-sufficiency with minimal preparation and ongoing assistance. Research consistently documents the poor outcomes associated with aging out: homelessness rates of 40 to 50 percent within the first year, extremely low rates of post-secondary educational attainment, high rates of unemployment and poverty, elevated mental health and substance use challenges, and increased involvement with the criminal justice system.

Several Canadian provinces have begun to extend care and support beyond age 18, recognizing the developmental reality that the transition to adulthood is a gradual process requiring sustained support. Ontario’s Continued Care and Support for Youth (CCSY) program and British Columbia’s Agreements with Young Adults (AYA) provide continued financial support and access to services for former youth in care up to age 24 or 26. However, these extended care programs vary significantly across jurisdictions, are not universally accessible, and often provide support levels inadequate to the actual costs of independent living.

12.3 Trafficking of Youth in Care

Youth in the child welfare system, and particularly those who have experienced placement instability, are at heightened risk of human trafficking (人口贩卖). Traffickers deliberately target young people in group homes and foster care, who may be vulnerable due to histories of abuse, lack of stable attachments, desire for belonging and affection, and limited supervision. The Public Safety Canada National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking identifies youth in care as a priority population, yet the systemic conditions that produce vulnerability — insufficient placement options, under-staffed group homes, lack of culturally appropriate services for Indigenous girls — persist. Effective anti-trafficking responses for youth in care require not only criminal justice interventions targeting traffickers but also fundamental reforms to the child welfare system itself.

Chapter 13: Youth and Technology

13.1 Online Exploitation and Digital Harms

The digital environment has created new vectors of vulnerability for at-risk youth. Online sexual exploitation (网络性剥削) — including the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material, online luring, sextortion, and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images — has expanded dramatically with the proliferation of digital platforms. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection reports year-over-year increases in reports of online sexual exploitation, with particular concern about the targeting of youth through social media platforms, gaming environments, and messaging applications. At-risk youth — those who are socially isolated, have histories of abuse, lack parental supervision, or are seeking affirmation and connection — are disproportionately targeted.

Cyberbullying (网络欺凌) represents another dimension of digital harm, with Canadian data indicating that approximately one in five youth have experienced cyberbullying. For LGBTQ+ youth, racialized youth, and youth with disabilities, online harassment often intersects with and amplifies offline discrimination, creating pervasive environments of hostility that extend into every space where digital connectivity reaches.

13.2 Digital Inclusion and Exclusion

The digital divide (数字鸿沟) — unequal access to digital technologies and the internet — has become a significant dimension of youth inequality, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic made digital access essential for education, employment, and social connection. Youth in poverty, youth in rural and remote communities, Indigenous youth on reserves, and youth experiencing homelessness face significant barriers to digital inclusion, including inability to afford devices and data, lack of stable internet access, and absence of the technical literacy necessary to navigate digital systems. The shift to online learning during the pandemic exposed and exacerbated these inequalities, with many at-risk youth effectively shut out of education for extended periods.

Chapter 14: Community-Based Interventions

14.1 Principles of Effective Intervention

Decades of research and practice have generated a substantial evidence base regarding the characteristics of effective interventions for at-risk youth. While no single program model works for all youth in all contexts, several principles recur across the literature:

Youth engagement and voice: Programs that involve young people as active participants in design, implementation, and governance — rather than treating them as passive recipients of services — consistently outperform those that do not. Youth participatory action research (YPAR) exemplifies this principle, positioning young people as co-researchers who investigate and act upon the conditions affecting their communities.

Cultural relevance and safety: Interventions must be grounded in the cultural contexts of the youth they serve. For Indigenous youth, this means programs that centre Indigenous knowledge systems, languages, and healing practices. For newcomer youth, it means services that are linguistically accessible and attuned to the specific stresses of migration and resettlement.

Trauma-informed practice: Recognition that many at-risk youth have experienced significant adversity and that service environments must be designed to avoid retraumatization is now widely accepted as a baseline standard, though implementation remains uneven.

Holistic and integrated approaches: Because the challenges facing at-risk youth are interconnected — housing instability, mental health, substance use, educational disengagement, justice involvement — effective interventions must address multiple domains simultaneously rather than treating each issue in isolation.

14.2 Mutual Aid and Peer Support

Mutual aid (互助) — the voluntary, reciprocal exchange of resources and support among community members — has a long history as a survival strategy among marginalized communities and has gained renewed scholarly and activist attention. For at-risk youth, mutual aid networks can provide material resources (food, clothing, shelter information), emotional support, practical knowledge (how to navigate bureaucratic systems), and a sense of belonging and solidarity.

Peer support programs, in which young people with lived experience of homelessness, substance use, mental health challenges, or justice involvement are trained to support others navigating similar situations, leverage the credibility and empathy that comes from shared experience. Research suggests that peer support can be particularly effective in engaging youth who are distrustful of formal service systems.

14.3 Stakeholder Engagement and Community Action

Effective responses to the challenges facing at-risk youth require the engagement of multiple stakeholders (利益相关者): young people themselves, families, community organizations, schools, healthcare providers, child welfare agencies, justice system actors, municipal and provincial governments, and private-sector employers. Community action planning — a participatory process through which stakeholders collectively identify priorities, develop strategies, and coordinate implementation — represents a promising approach to moving beyond fragmented, crisis-driven responses toward systemic change.

Chapter 15: Resilience and Strength-Based Approaches

15.1 Defining Resilience

Resilience (韧性/抗逆力) has become one of the most influential concepts in the study of at-risk youth, though its meaning and implications are vigorously debated. At its most basic, resilience refers to the process of positive adaptation in the context of significant adversity. Ann Masten’s characterization of resilience as “ordinary magic” (普通的魔力) emphasizes that it arises not from extraordinary individual qualities but from the operation of normative human developmental processes — attachment, self-regulation, motivation, cognitive development — that function well when basic supports are in place. Masten’s research demonstrated that resilience does not require rare or special qualities; rather, it emerges from the “ordinary magic” of basic human adaptive systems. The implication is profound: if the developmental infrastructure that produces resilience is normative rather than exceptional, then the failure of resilience in at-risk youth populations reflects the destruction or deprivation of these ordinary systems by adverse social conditions — a failure of the environment, not of the child.

15.2 Ungar’s Ecological Model of Resilience

Michael Ungar’s research, based on studies of youth across multiple countries and cultural contexts, extends the concept of resilience beyond individual traits to emphasize the role of social ecologies in facilitating (or impeding) positive development. Ungar argues that resilience is best understood as the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the resources they need for well-being, combined with the capacity of their environments to provide those resources in culturally meaningful ways. Ungar’s cross-cultural research, conducted through the International Resilience Project involving youth from over a dozen countries, revealed that while the outcomes associated with resilience vary across cultures, seven underlying tensions are consistently negotiated by resilient youth: access to material resources, relationships, identity, power and control, cultural adherence, social justice, and cohesion. The cultural context determines how these tensions are resolved: in collectivist cultures, resilience may manifest as compliance with community expectations, while in individualist contexts it may appear as autonomous self-assertion. Both are valid expressions of positive adaptation, a finding that challenges the universalization of Western, middle-class developmental norms.

This formulation has two critical implications. First, it redistributes responsibility for resilience from the individual to the social ecology: if a young person fails to demonstrate resilience, the failure may lie not in the youth but in the environment’s failure to provide adequate resources. Second, it insists on cultural relativity: what counts as positive adaptation varies across cultural contexts, and Western, middle-class norms of successful development should not be universalized.

15.3 Resilience as Process, Not Trait

A critical distinction in contemporary resilience scholarship is between resilience understood as a trait (a fixed individual characteristic) and resilience understood as a process (a dynamic interaction between persons and environments over time). The trait model — the idea that some people are simply “more resilient” than others — has been largely superseded by processual models that emphasize the contextual, temporal, and relational dimensions of positive adaptation. A young person may demonstrate remarkable resilience in one domain (maintaining academic performance) while struggling profoundly in another (mental health), or may show resilience at one developmental moment and vulnerability at another. This variability is not evidence of inconsistency but of the fundamentally ecological nature of resilience: it depends on the fit between individual needs and environmental resources, and that fit shifts across time, context, and developmental stage.

15.4 Strength-Based Practice

Strength-based approaches (优势视角) represent a deliberate departure from deficit-oriented models that catalogue what is wrong with at-risk youth. Instead, strength-based practice begins by identifying the capacities, knowledge, skills, and social connections that young people already possess, and builds from these assets.

In practical terms, strength-based work involves asking different questions: not “What is wrong with you?” but “What is strong with you?” Not “What services do you need?” but “What are your goals, and what resources — internal and external — can we mobilize to help you achieve them?” This reorientation is not merely rhetorical; it fundamentally restructures the relationship between service providers and youth, positioning young people as experts on their own lives rather than as passive objects of professional intervention.

15.5 Post-Traumatic Growth and Meaning-Making

While trauma can produce lasting harm, research also documents the phenomenon of post-traumatic growth (创伤后成长) — positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. Young people who have navigated homelessness, justice involvement, or substance use sometimes describe enhanced appreciation for life, deepened relationships, increased personal strength, recognition of new possibilities, and spiritual or existential development. Acknowledging this capacity for growth does not minimize the harm of adversity; rather, it recognizes the full complexity of human responses to difficult circumstances.

Chapter 16: Policy Responses and Systemic Change

16.1 The Canadian Policy Landscape

Canadian policy responses to at-risk youth are distributed across multiple levels of government (federal, provincial/territorial, municipal) and across multiple policy domains (child welfare, education, health, justice, housing, income security). This fragmentation creates gaps, duplication, and coordination challenges that directly affect the young people who must navigate these systems.

Key federal policy instruments include the Canada Child Benefit, the National Housing Strategy (which includes commitments related to youth homelessness), the Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy, and the YCJA. Provincial and territorial governments hold primary responsibility for education, health, and child welfare, leading to significant interprovincial variation in the services and supports available to at-risk youth.

16.2 From Individual Intervention to Structural Change

A recurring theme in the sociological study of at-risk youth is the tension between interventions aimed at individual young people and strategies aimed at transforming the structural conditions that produce vulnerability. Both are necessary, but the balance of investment in most Canadian jurisdictions tilts heavily toward individual-level programs, leaving the upstream determinants of risk — poverty, racism, colonialism, housing unaffordability — largely unaddressed.

16.3 Advocacy, Activism, and the Role of Op-Eds

Public advocacy plays a crucial role in shifting policy discourse and securing political commitment to addressing the conditions facing at-risk youth. The op-ed (评论文章) — a short, persuasive piece published in a newspaper or media outlet — is a powerful tool for translating scholarly knowledge and lived experience into accessible arguments directed at policymakers, opinion leaders, and the general public.

Effective advocacy for at-risk youth combines rigorous evidence with compelling narrative, centres the voices and agency of young people themselves, names specific policy demands rather than relying on vague calls for awareness, and holds governments and institutions accountable for their commitments. The tradition of public sociology — sociology that engages directly with publics beyond the academy — provides a disciplinary framework for this kind of work.

16.4 International Perspectives

Comparative analysis reveals that countries with more robust welfare states, lower levels of income inequality, and stronger commitments to universal social provision tend to produce better outcomes for vulnerable youth. The Nordic countries, for example, combine universal access to healthcare, education, and income support with targeted programs for youth at elevated risk, resulting in lower rates of youth homelessness, incarceration, and health disparities than are found in liberal welfare states such as Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

These comparisons suggest that the challenges facing at-risk youth in Canada are not inevitable but are products of specific political choices about the distribution of resources and the design of institutions. Different choices are possible, and the evidence from other jurisdictions demonstrates that they can produce meaningfully different outcomes.

Chapter 17: Toward Justice — Synthesis and Future Directions

17.1 Recurrent Themes

Several themes recur across the topics examined in this text and merit explicit synthesis:

Structural causation: The vulnerabilities experienced by at-risk youth are overwhelmingly products of social, economic, and political structures rather than individual deficits. Poverty, colonialism, racism, hetero-cisnormativity, and neoliberal welfare retrenchment create the conditions within which young people become “at risk.”

Intersectionality: Risk is not evenly distributed but is concentrated at the intersections of multiple systems of oppression. Indigenous youth, racialized youth, LGBTQ+ youth, youth with disabilities, and youth in poverty face compounded vulnerabilities that require intersectionally informed responses.

Agency and resilience: Despite facing profound adversity, at-risk youth are not passive victims. They exercise agency, develop survival strategies, build communities, and engage in collective action. Effective interventions recognize and build upon this agency rather than seeking to override it.

Systems failure: The institutions ostensibly designed to serve youth — education, child welfare, healthcare, justice — frequently fail them, and in many cases actively reproduce the conditions of vulnerability. Systemic reform, not merely individual program improvement, is necessary.

17.2 What Would Justice Look Like?

A justice-oriented approach to at-risk youth would entail, at minimum:

• The elimination of child and youth poverty through adequate income supports, affordable housing, and living wages.
• Genuine decolonization, including the transfer of jurisdiction over child and family services to Indigenous communities, the resolution of land claims, and investment in community-determined development.
• The dismantling of systemic racism in education, policing, justice, health, and child welfare systems.
• Universal access to mental health and substance use services that are integrated, culturally safe, and free of charge.
• The decriminalization of poverty and homelessness.
• The creation of affirming, safe environments for LGBTQ+ and Two-Spirit youth.
• The centering of youth voices in policy design, program development, and governance.
• Comprehensive reform of the child welfare system, including extended care provisions, reduced reliance on institutional placements, and meaningful implementation of Indigenous jurisdiction over child and family services.
• Robust regulation of digital environments to protect youth from online exploitation while ensuring digital inclusion for marginalized populations.

17.3 The Imperative of Solidarity

The challenges facing at-risk youth cannot be resolved by professionals, policymakers, or researchers acting alone. They require broad-based solidarity (团结) — the recognition that the well-being of the most marginalized young people is inseparable from the well-being of the community as a whole. Community action planning, mutual aid, participatory research, and sustained political advocacy represent concrete expressions of this solidarity, connecting the expertise of scholars and practitioners with the knowledge and agency of young people themselves.

The study of at-risk youth is, fundamentally, the study of how societies distribute opportunity, risk, care, and punishment across generations. It asks whether we are willing to organize our collective resources in ways that ensure every young person has access to the conditions necessary for a life of dignity, health, and meaningful participation. The answer to that question is not academic; it is political, moral, and profoundly consequential.