Food insecurity in our country is alarming. The fact that we live in such a wealthy place, combined with poverty that leads to children missing meals, is a humiliation every American should reckon with. While programs like SNAP and others try, against Republican odds, to help assist families in need, there are many others who are not fortunate and must fend for themselves. A new study that focuses on the food scarcity issues of American teens is pretty horrifying.
An estimated 6.8 million people ages 10 to 17 are food insecure, meaning they don’t have reliable access to enough affordable, nutritious food. Another 2.9 million are very food insecure, and roughly 4 million live in marginally food secure households, where the threat of running out of food is real.
Along with the stigma felt by teens around food insecurity, and the resulting lack of employment opportunities available to them because of their lack of experience, teens must be more inventive in their strategies around food. The report focused on 20 groups from 10 diverse communities.
- When faced with acute food insecurity, teens in all but two of the communities said that youth engage in criminal behavior, ranging from shoplifting food directly to selling drugs and stealing items to resell for cash. These behaviors were most common among young men in communities with the most limited job options.
- Teens in all 10 communities and in 13 of the 20 focus groups talked about some youth selling sex for money to pay for food. These themes arose most strongly in high-poverty communities where teens also described sexually coercive environments. Sexual exploitation most commonly took the form of transactional dating relationships with older adults.
Among the more benign but equally depressing findings were that teens want to work to help their families but cannot get the kind of work that would make a meaningful dent in their food situation. Teens will hide their economic issues because of the stigma attached and will eat at other family members’ and friends’ homes as a subterfuge for their own home’s lack of food.
“I’ve been doing research in low-income communities for a long time, and I’ve written extensively about the experiences of women in high poverty communities and the risk of sexual exploitation, but this was new,” said Susan Popkin, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and lead author of the report, Impossible Choices.
“Even for me, who has been paying attention to this and has heard women tell their stories for a long time, the extent to which we were hearing about food being related to this vulnerability was new and shocking to me, and the level of desperation that it implies was really shocking to me. It’s a situation I think is just getting worse over time.”
Teens are frequently left off the lists of focus. But these teens are that much closer to having the right to vote and being the future of our workforce.