New study: Atlanta homeless LGBT youth numbers are Growing

I saw this in the GA Voice and cringed. I can't believe this info. Who would've thought?

So, let's jump to it. A Georgia State study revealed that over 950 of the 3,374 homeless youth in the metro Atlanta are LGBT.

GA Voice reports:

That’s a 27 percent increase over a previously reported estimate of 750 LGBT homeless youth in the area.

The new findings come from Georgia State University’s 2015 Atlanta Youth Count and Needs Assessment (AYCNA), which took place from May through July of last year and involved 50 Georgia State and Emory University students scouring the metro Atlanta area to count homeless youth between the ages of 14 and 25.

“Certainly the fact that well over one-in-four homeless youth identify as LGBT, the 6.5 percent that identify as transgender, all of those sadly reinforce what we have known anecdotally for a really long time—that homelessness among young LGBT people is something we really need to focus on,” said Georgia Equality executive director Jeff Graham, who was in attendance at the Tuesday press conference.

And...

Other troubling numbers from the study concerned Atlanta’s homeless transgender youth.

Transgender and gender nonconforming homeless youth reported higher rates of sexual activity, with 37.8 percent reporting sexual activity with six or more partners in the past year versus an overall average of 22.6 percent who reported the same.

Over half of the transgender and gender nonconforming homeless youth reported being the victim of sexual abuse and nearly all—93.1 percent—reported that they had been paid for sex.

There were, however, some surprising numbers on HIV testing and infection. 88.5 percent of the total respondents reported being tested for HIV at least once ever, with four out of five in that group saying they’d had a test in the past year. And only 2.7 percent of the overall group reported being HIV positive, with 2.8 percent saying they didn’t know their status.