Why So Many Runaway Children?
The Bible and Family Life—This theme will be featured in four successive issues of The Watchtower
“Can anyone imagine how much a mother suffers when her daughter runs away? It is a nightmare. Why did she leave? I cannot understand it. She was such a sweet and happy girl and very young.
“Where is she tonight? Is she warm? Is she hungry? Is she lonely? I love her so much. There is no one I can talk to. There is nothing I can do but wait.
“Every time the phone rings my heart leaps. But she doesn’t call and there is no news. I have prayed for her safety and for the strength to see this through. I keep imagining that at any moment she will walk through the door.
“ . . . I think of so many crazy things as I try to deaden the pain. Oh, dear God, bring my little girl home.”
THE above letter was sent to a noted advice columnist in the early 1970’s. It was a time when it was thought that runaways were leaving for frivolous reasons: a search for adventure, a test of independence, disagreement over a curfew, despondency due to a broken romance. While some still leave for the same reasons, things have changed in the last 15 years.
Today’s youth often leave because of situations that are much more tragic—seriously eroded family conditions in which they feel unwanted and unloved; they may even be abused. And instead of running to something—a more alluring and appealing life-style—they are running from something, a disintegrating and unhappy homelife. “Runaways are very different now from what they were when so much was being written about them” in the early 1970’s, says Dr. Douglas Huenergardt, supervisor of a Florida runaway shelter. “During that time we had kids seeking alternative lifestyles. That’s not what’s happening today. The child who’s running is one who simply can’t stand it at home any longer.”
Recent studies bear that out. Yet they also show something else that is startling. Not only are many children running to escape an intolerable family life but today close to half of the runaways in the United States leave home involuntarily—pushed out or encouraged to leave home by their own parents! “For many adolescents running away is a response to an unhealthy family, work or school situation,” notes the journal Family Relations. “Many runaways are, in actuality, throwaways, castaways, or pushouts. These youths are told to leave or are abandoned by their parents. Some are severely and repeatedly abused and see no alternative but to leave.”
How tragic! How sad for the children! For, once out on the street, with little money and no means of support, youths often turn to begging, drug dealing, prostitution, and thievery, or they are victimized by others. “It is not social workers and psychologists who greet runaways in bus stations, but pimps, drug dealers and pornographers,” says the magazine Psychology Today. “Eighty-six percent of the experts polled said that little or nothing is being done to prevent runaways from falling victim to these predators. Not surprisingly, the health of runaways deteriorates the longer they are on the street.”
True, more and more shelters are being set up to house, feed, and guide homeless children. But getting the runaways there and actually being able to help them is another matter. “Our job is to instill in them a degree of self-esteem, to have them care about themselves,” states one counselor. “And it’s the hardest job I’ve ever had.” By the time youths get there, they are often wary and distrustful of adults, are hurt, angry, or despondent, and may even be suicidal.
Could problems be solved at their source? “By far, the greatest number of runaway episodes will stem from family matters of some sort,” notes Search, a New Jersey based registry of the missing. “A basically happy person will not run away.” What, then, will work for happiness in the family? Can the parent-child bonds be strengthened?