Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways
For Runaways on the Street, Sex Buys Survival
Links
To read the first article,
Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways, click here.To read the second article ,
For Runaways on the Street, Sex Buys Survival, click here.To watch a video entitled When No One’s Looking Part I, click here.
This video talks about how to hide when no one is looking.To watch a video entitled When No One’s Looking, Part II click here.
This video talks about and how homeless youth learn to sale sex for shelters.We strongly encourage you to watch both videos which explains how the homeless youth hide and survive on the streets.
On Monday October 25, 2009, The New York Times published the first of two articles by Ian Urbina on Running in the Shadows; Children on Their Own. The two articles focus on the growing number of young runaways in the United States, exploring how they survive and efforts by the authorities to help them.
Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13. Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens.
Federal studies and experts in the field have estimated that at least 1.6 million juveniles run away or are thrown out of their homes annually. But most of those return home within a week, and the government does not conduct a comprehensive or current count.
The best measure of the problem may be the number of contacts with runaways that federally-financed outreach programs make, which rose to 761,000 in
2008 from 550,000 in 2002, when current methods of counting began. (The number fell in 2007, but rose sharply again last year, and the number of federal outreach programs has been fairly steady throughout the period.)Too young to get a hotel room, sign a lease or in many cases hold a job, young runaways are increasingly surviving by selling drugs, panhandling or engaging in prostitution, according to the National Runaway Switchboard, the federally-financed national hot line created in 1974. Legitimate employment was hard to find in the summer of 2009; the Labor Department said fewer than 30 percent of teenagers had jobs.
In more than 50 interviews over 11 months, teenagers living on their own in eight states told of a harrowing existence that in many cases involved sleeping in abandoned buildings, couch-surfing among friends and relatives or camping on riverbanks and in parks after fleeing or being kicked out by families in financial crisis.
The runaways spend much of their time avoiding the authorities because they assume the officials are trying to send them home. But most often the police are not looking for them as missing-person cases at all, just responding to complaints about loitering or menacing. In fact, federal data indicate that usually no one is looking for the runaways, either because parents have not reported them missing or the police have mishandled the reports.
