Sydney youth calls for homelessness reform

A Sydney survivor of abuse and homelessness has spoken out about the need to plug gaps in youth services and pay much closer attention to the voices of young people.

The young woman, who chose not to be named, was forced out of home at the age of 17 in 2013 after several suicide attempts.

"My parents were divorced and both my family homes were not safe ... it kind of got to the point where I didn't want to go home any more," she told AAP on Wednesday.

"I was a bystander to family violence, I think, I don't know how to define it yet.

"It becomes encoded in your identity, it becomes part of your personality. It informs the way you view the world."

More than half of young people who access NSW youth homeless services are victims of domestic or family violence, new figures reveal.

At many services it's closer to 80 per cent of 10 to 24-year-old clients, according to homeless shelter Yfoundations, which released the research at a Youth Homelessness Matters Day conference in Sydney on Wednesday.

Speaking outside the conference, the young survivor said after escaping violence at home, she spent several years staying at crisis refuges and in transitional housing.

The young woman, now aged 19 and living independently, said youth homelessness services needed to be more cohesive.

The university student said addressing homelessness meant much more than putting a roof over somebody's head, and addressing mental health issues needed to become a key focus.

"It needs to be a much more integrated system where services are talking to each other," she said.

"I have a lot of supports around me, but sometimes I think I'm talking to 10 different people about the same thing, over and over again."

Yfoundations chief executive Michael Coffey said better targeted training, resources and policies were needed at the intersection of domestic and family violence and youth homelessness.

"Too often conversations about youth homelessness do not emphasise domestic violence, and debates about domestic violence tend not to address youth," he said.

"In the gap between, this is a group of highly disadvantaged young people who are not getting the specialist support that they need."

The group is calling for more youth-specific domestic and family violence training for support services staff, and greater access to mental health and trauma specialists, including counsellors and psychologists.

National Children's Commissioner Megan Mitchell told the conference that children and young people often ran away from home to flee abuse and violence, and were too frequently considered incidental or peripheral to the experiences of their parents.