Legal Advocacy

By Author: Sherry Roberts
Total Articles: 153

Introduction
Children and their families encounter various challenges which required to be addressed through a change of some policies currently in place. Among the various challenges faced by children and families without a stable income, is homelessness. Homelessness influences every aspect of a child’s life and by extension the family. The experiences in homelessness limit the physical, emotional, cognitive, social, and behavioral development of children. For this assignment, how legal advocacy can be utilized in handling the issue of homelessness for children and their families will be addressed based on the developed case study.
Case Study
John is a young boy aged twelve years and is born in a family with two other children; Hopkins, and Laura. Hopkins is seven years of age and Laura is 17 years of age, and they all live with their mother in a small town in Chicago. The mother is a low-income earner and struggles to survive and bring up her children. She also lacks a stable housing that categorizes the family as homelessness since they cannot have a rented home all through the year but depend on weekly rental which sometimes is challenging to pay. The children are currently supposed to be in school, but their condition of homelessness makes it challenging to acquire education. Their mother is in her early 40s and is worried that she may never provide decent housing and a good lifestyle to her children. The eldest child, Laura, is likely to have early marriage due to the problems encountered at home of poverty and homelessness. The low socioeconomic status of the family renders it liable for numerous challenges which are difficult to address by themselves.
Description of the issue
America’s economic crisis has had a significant impact on the lives of millions of people. There are issues of job layoffs that affect the low-income communities and deepen the poverty levels which are linked to homelessness and food insecurity for Americans and children. Among the world industrialized countries, the U.S has the highest number of homeless women and children, especially after the Great Depression. The homeless families form part of an approximate of 34% of the total U.S homeless population (Mitchell, 2011). An approximate of 1.6 million children are likely to suffer from homelessness within the course of a year, and within any given day, about 200,000 children have nowhere to live. For the homeless women, about 60% have children below 18 years, and among all the homeless men, about 41% have children less than 18 years (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2006).
Homeless families are comprised of a mother in her late twenties and with children. Most of the homeless families are headed by a female figure since single-parent families are the most likely to be poor and vulnerable to homelessness. The families of color are the most affected among the homeless population. About 43% are African Americans, 15% are Hispanic, 38% are White, and 3% are the Native Americans (Sermons & Witte, 2011). The families suffering from homelessness have limited access to education, and many of them do not have a high school diploma education qualification. The children are suffering from homelessness experience high rates of acute health problems, stressful and traumatic experiences that affect their quest for education. They also experience violence in their lives. On the other hand, their mothers experience anger, self-blame, hopelessness, and fear and are likely to be stressed (Sermons & Witte, 2011). For the selected family in the case study, homelessness affects them due to being a single parent family and that the mother does not have a stable income. She is also uneducated making it challenging to get a well-paying job. Homelessness affects the upbringing of children since they are often not with their mother who has negative effects on them. The children also have limited access to quality health care services and education since their mother cannot afford to pay for the services (Grant, Gracy, Goldsmith, Shapiro & Redlener, 2013).
Benefit of legal advocacy to the case
Legal advocacy can be beneficial in addressing the problem of homelessness in America through the change of the existing policies on housing programs. The people experiencing homelessness or at high risk of homelessness, are among the most marginalized groups within the community. The most cause of homelessness is a lack of affordable housing since wages are not enough to afford to house for many people in the community (Mitchell, 2011).

Sherry Roberts is the author of this paper. A senior editor at Melda Research in online nursing papers. If you need a similar paper you can place your order for a custom research paper from legitimate research paper writing service services.