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SHELTER CARE
Shelter care provides temporary residential care to youths who are in need of short-term placement outside the home (usually 1 to 45 days). Shelter care facilities are generally nonsecure or staff secure.
In 1991, the National Association of Social Workers surveyed 360 agencies that provide basic shelter, crisis intervention, and transitional living services to runaway and homeless youths and determined that about 60 percent of these youths nationwide were victims of physical and sexual abuse by parents. Almost 30 percent of the youth had problems with alcohol or substance abuse, and more than 40 percent of them came from families with long-term economic problems (NASW, 1991).
The seriousness of such problems has led many shelter providers to go beyond their basic mission of providing "short-term placement outside the home." Today, many shelters offer a broad range of counseling and treatment services for the youths who reside there. Stepping Stone, a licensed Los Angeles crisis shelter for youths aged 7-17, has created a highly structured 14-day program that includes counseling, social services, medical, legal, and educational advocacy-and short-term follow-up (Petry, 1992). The Family Place shelter in Dallas, Texas, offers a "Therapeutic Activity Program" to intervene with behavioral and social problems exhibited by the younger children there (deLange, 1986), and the Shelter Agencies for Families in East Texas (SAFE-T) network offers a wide range of treatment and counseling services for juvenile victims of rape and domestic violence.
To date, there is little reliable data on the outcomes of such short-term, shelter-based treatment programs. However, a series of studies conducted at the Boys Town Emergency Shelter Program in the mid-1990s do suggest that short-term, shelter-based therapeutic programs can produce a positive impact on juvenile offenders. The research staff of the Boys Town Shelter found that a modified version of the teaching family home therapeutic approach, accompanied by parent-training and aftercare services, appeared to reduce the number of behavior problems and increase the satisfaction of residents in the juvenile shelter over the short term. They also found that shelter residents who were successfully reunified with their families after their stay in the shelter were less likely to return to the shelter care system at some later date. Although the Boys Town studies are too small in scale to draw any strong conclusions, they do suggest that structured, short-term therapeutic programs in emergency shelters may play a valuable role in helping youth build the interpersonal and family skills necessary to reenter society (Teare et al., 1992-94).