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Jennifer's Story about Jason

Many years ago I was working as a guardianship and resources worker and was the ‘state-appointed parent' for children and youth who were in government care on a permanent basis. Jason was one of the young people on my caseload. At 14 years of age, he had experienced more trauma and abuse than many of the other children that I worked with. His mom had been a sex trade worker and had a heroin addiction. Jason found her dead from an overdose when he was just 8 years of age. He didn't know who his father was. After the death of his mom, he was placed with an aunt and uncle who physically and sexually abused him. He came into government care at the age of 10 but we were not very successful at finding him a foster family that was able to care for him in an effective way so he ended up in a repetitive cycle of foster care placement, foster care breakdown, and receiving home placement. When he was 13 years of age, Jason was placed into a group home and the idea of finding a stable foster home for him was set aside. Instead, the hope was that he would connect with the workers in the group home and establish a more stable existence. Around this time, however, Jason was recruited as a male prostitute. He continued to have the group home as his ‘home base' and thankfully, the staff always kept the door open for him to come back even when he went ‘AWOL' for a few days.

I grew very fond of Jason. He was small, lean, and wiry, with eyes that darted around the room and took everything in. He was a gifted story-teller, and he offered vivid descriptions of everything from the way that the North Shore mountains looked after the first snowfall of the season, to the way he was treated by a John the night before. Despite all he had experienced in his short life, he still had dreams and we began to explore these dreams and talk about ways to make them come alive.

As long as he stayed in the sex trade Jason knew that it was only a matter of time before he was seriously hurt or killed. And yet, his work made him feel like a ‘somebody'. It distinguished him from other kids his age, it was more exciting and he lived more on the edge, he had money, and given his age and build, he was ‘hot' and in demand. In the other parts of his life – in school if he attended and in the group home – he didn't feel special or unique. His identity was intertwined with his street involvement and prostitution. How could I challenge or compete with this?

However, Jason was wise and he wondered with me if he could find another place, away from the streets, where he would feel special. We began to explore possibilities and after some searching we decided that he would attend a program on an isolated island about 6 hours north of the city. You could only get on and off the island by private boat so it was unlikely that either his pimp would go to the trouble of dragging him back or Jason would be able to find a way to get off the island. The small program drew from the Outward Bound tradition, but specialized in working with street-involved young people. Participants could stay up to two years, during which time they home-schooled, developed new life and work skills, and learned from their natural surroundings. It was a total immersion in a new and unfamiliar environment.

Jason wanted to try this, but struggled with the reality of it as his identity was so wrapped up in his city life. The workers were skilled and patient and rather than expecting Jason to give up who he was, they reframed his experience, helped him discover his many strengths (can you imagine surviving on the streets the way Jason was able to – certainly he had strengths) and exposed him to many new experiences that helped him see that the world had many different facets and he could make different choices. Jason was on the island for just over a year at which point he wanted to see what it was like to be in the city again. The program staff felt that he could make the transition so we planned for his return.

He came back and within a month he was drawn back into the sex trade. I felt so sad and worried for Jason. But then an interesting thing happened. He came to see me and described, in his rich narrative way, how he was seeing the whole world differently now. He had gone back to the streets to “check it out” but it didn't do anything good for him anymore. He said, “this isn't who I am and I don't want to be here. I'm better than this.” He asked to go back to the island and said he wanted to work with the staff there to make a different plan for his life. We arranged this and Jason took on a leadership role in the program. With the help of the staff, he developed his outdoor guiding skills. He stayed another year and then, one of the staff helped him to find a family placement in a small community near the island. By the time Jason left care at age 19 he had a sense of purpose, and a set of new skills that enabled him to work in the emerging field of outdoor adventure guiding. I lost track of Jason, but I wonder how his life turned out. I do believe that if I had expected him to change while he was still immersed in his daily life in the city that he would had died long before his 19th birthday and I would have been spending time arranging a funeral rather than hearing his wonderful and often humorous stories about “life in the sticks”.