Unequally Placed: A Case Study of the Geographical Organization of Social Services for Marginalized Youth

Abstract

Jackson, 16, has just lost his father to cancer and has nowhere to go so he drops out of high school to look for work. Chrissy, 18, and a recovering addict, sometimes wakes up still thinking about the drugs. She doesn’t use the drugs, but she says that she still needs them. Steph, 20, is on a path towards ‘normal expected success’ when past trauma re-enters her every day. She takes all her prescribed pills on multiple occasions to end her life because her family doesn’t believe the abuse she describes. She tells me she can’t think about the future because she still has to be alive to deal with it. And Mark, 22, has been homeless for 5 years, not consecutively, but long enough to equate home with the streets more than with the times he’s had a roof over his head. These are some of the everyday lives of young people included in this dissertation. Using the case of one organization that operates across a rural and urban context in Ontario, Canada, I investigate the organization of social services for youth. Throughout I show that if young people experience forms of marginalization, and disadvantage like those described above in an urban context, they will likely know about and have access to local support centres, coordinated organizational processes, referral programs, and a network of social resources that are able to address their multiple and complex needs. The rural context, however, works in drastically different ways, even when the services are expected to be the same. In other words, the geographical location operates as a social force that shapes both young people’s experiences of, and organizational responses to, inequality. In the pages that follow I explore how intersecting social processes alleviate forms of disadvantage experienced by youth in urban settings, and paradoxically, reproduce and sustain forms of inequality experienced by rural youth. Importantly this research shows that the geographical location of people in disadvantaged positions matters to the ways that the experience unfolds. Getting out of marginalized positions for rural youth is more challenging because the rural setting is not set up to do this work; in other words, compared to urban settings, the rural context is unequally placed.