To understand street life and its connections with crime, it is important to examine circumstances that lead youth from their families, as well as their lives on the street. A sense of these background and foreground experiences emerges from interviews we conducted with street youth. In these interviews, street youth describe their pasts and provide insights into experiences and events that lead to leaving home. These interviews also offer an introduction to the pleasures and problems of street life, including companionship and the availability of drugs and alcohol, as well as the difficulties of finding shelter, safety, food, and money. Many of these stories are disturbing, but they add a penetrating personal dimension to our understanding of the life histories of street youth and the daily situations they encounter.

In this and following chapters, we draw on nearly one hundred of the more than two hundred interviews we conducted with street youth in the third wave of our summer panel study. We present background details or experiences and a pseudonym to distinguish among the many young people with whom we spoke. This sociobiographical information is introduced to develop a composite picture of street youth that parallels the personal narratives often provided for smaller numbers of subjects in qualitative studies.

We provide a background to the interviews by drawing first on descriptive statistics from our initial study of 390 street youth in Toronto. This purposive sample was developed between the springs of 1987 and 1988 and involved surveying youth in shelters, drop-in centers, city parks, and on street corners in downtown Toronto.