Kate Allen
Published on Tuesday, Jul. 13, 2010 11:08AM EDT
Teenaged foreign students from Asia living with British Columbia home-stay families are two times more likely than their Canadian counterparts to use cocaine, and nearly a quarter of girls report being sexually abused, according to a new study.
Home-stay students also binge-drink and smoke more, skip school more, and are more sexually active than their immigrant or Canadian-born Asian counterparts. The study, the first of its kind in Canada, tracked health and risk-taking among 3,000 Asian home-stay students in grades 7 to 12 in B.C.
The authors of the University of British Columbia study want government oversight for the unregulated home-stay industry. There were 18,200 foreign high-school students studying in Canada in 2008, but no way of telling how many lived in home-stays, which are privately run and not monitored by any external agency.
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