Foreign teen students more likely to use drugs, many face abuse: study

First-of-its-kind study in Canada tracks health, risk-taking among Asian home-stay students

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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Thousands more children at risk

Huge crackdown on children’s services after Baby P inquiry as 28 councils are named and shamed over failed care.

By Richard Garner Tuesday, 2 December 2008

Thousands of Britain's most vulnerable children are at risk because councils are failing to move swiftly enough to protect them from abuse, it emerged last night.

Dozens of local authorities are taking inadequate action to avoid repetition of serious abuse cases, warned the head of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted).
As the Government announced an unprecedented crackdown on children's services in an attempt to avoid another tragedy like that involving Baby P, the watchdog published a list of 28 councils where internal inquiries into serious injuries or child deaths caused by abuse were judged "inadequate".

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