In the United States, it is estimated that there are 3.5 million homeless people, (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2007), 1.37 million of them children, and 40% are families with children, (International Journal of Psychosocial Research, 2008).
When we hear about the homeless people who use our local homeless shelters, we imagine that these people are misfits, unable to function normally in society. We don’t think of families. We don’t think of children. We don’t think of teenagers who have escaped abusive, destructive families, or who have been abandoned by their parents.
Yet, our country has an increasing number of homeless people who fit these descriptions, rather than the stereotypes we like to consider.
This half-hour documentary examines the "hidden homeless," the homeless children, who will go out of their way to fit in and try to look like everybody else, but are couch surfing, living in cars, sleeping in carwashes; one had been living in an abandoned bus, another living in a tent on an island in a river.