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Operation Runaway Conference
Youth Runaway Speech
University of Maryland
June 6, 2001
Greetings and acknowledgments
Thank you, Debbie, and greetings, everyone. I'm delighted to be here with you to celebrate this tenth anniversary of Operation Runaway. I offer my congratulations and my thanks to this fine program not only on behalf of the Child Welfare League of America, but also as a citizen of Montgomery County, where my own children spent their teenage years.
This unique partnership that began with the head of a psychiatric institute and one police lieutenant has been a friend in need to as many as 1800 young people and their parents every year for these 10 years, and it has grown to embrace many public and private partners. I know, Debbie, that you and your partners are tremendously proud of what you have accomplished - and that you're also tremendously eager to do still more, to bring still more partners on board and increase the level of their participation, so that more children and families can receive the services they need.
Who Are These Kids?
So here we are at the tenth anniversary of Operation Runaway, a time for celebration and challenge. Let me begin by asking: Who are these kids we call runaways? How are they different from other kids?
Runaways and other status offenders are young people who have stepped outside of the role society assigns to them as minors, which is living at home and going to school. Usually, at least from their point of view, there's a darned good reason to step outside, but society has a problem with their being out of bounds. It's our problem as well as theirs.
Runaways occupy a kind of middle ground, in our system classifications, between the "sad kids" in the child welfare system and the "bad kids" in the juvenile justice system. Many of them are in fact known to child welfare, and quite a few have had brushes with the law, but as runaways, they're in the middle. It's a strange place to be.
Since most runaways are adolescents, they were already middle people, natives of that strange, untidy middle ground between childhood and adulthood. They fill their skins to the absolute outer edges. They may be as big as the adults who seem to stand between them and the things they want. They can look us in the eye, but they can't have regular incomes or life partners or most of the other things that ground us in our adult comfort and security.
Defiant and scared, big enough to move things but lacking knowledge about what can't be moved, daring us to set limits, but desperately in need of limits¾youth are the "in-between people"¾starting revolutions, and dying from their blind sense of immortality. As a group, they have brought some of the greatest riches to our culture, and they have also, at times, been its most apathetic and sardonic members. It's a crazy time¾adolescence.
Do you remember trying to gauge your way through it? Your body changing; expectations of you increasing; the power of clothes and music and friends; so much solitude and passion; and the unbelievable meaningfulness and meaninglessness of every little thing?
Do you remember being a teen, or an awkward preteen -- an ugly duckling with big feet and unbearably cramped horizons? Did you ever want to run away?
Is there anybody in the audience who ever did run away?
Does anybody want to tell about it?
I remember the time that I did. I was 12 or 13. I'd had a spat with my parents, and I wanted to show them how much they'd miss me if I wasn't there. I wanted them to be crazy with worrying about me. So I walked around the corner, past the church that marked the end of my street, and stretched out in the grass on a hill where I liked to go. I stayed there for about three hours imagining how worried they were and thinking hard about my options. I had about three, and it didn't take me long to decide that home was by far the best deal. I was, of course, one of the lucky ones.
Does anybody else have a story they'd like to share?
Please take a moment, everybody, to think back to your own adolescence, to those years when risk-taking was part of the developmental program. Then think about the scrapes your own kids have been in---bearing in mind that those are the ones you found out about.
The first point I want to emphasize is that kids who run away are not very different from kids who don't. As Robert Fulghum puts it, "the line between good and evil, hope and despair, does not divide the world between 'us' and 'them.' It runs right down the middle of every one of us."
Hundreds of thousands of young people from all classes and races leave home every year before they are able to stand on their own. Most of them are teens, but some are even younger. Most of them come back in a few days ---some even in a few hours, like I did. What separates young people who run for longer, or who run repeatedly, from me and my kids and from you and yours, is that they are responding to intolerable situations - situations that young people should not have to tolerate. Even if those situations are partly of their own making, appropriate alternatives should be available.
Away is not a place. It's a last-ditch option, a trapped creature's instinctive reaction. Even a kid who tells you that she's running to Las Vegas or New York City has no clear idea of what she'll find there, and no viable plans. She only knows she wants to get away.
Some kids are pushed out, or thrown away. Others choose to flee physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, or the family chaos created by drug and alcohol abuse, untreated mental illness, or abject poverty. For many of these youngsters, leaving home is an act of survival. But since they seldom have the experience or skills they need to get along in the adult world, they end up living in parks, subways, abandoned buildings, or cars; doing whatever they can to get food----prostituting themselves, stealing, dealing drugs---and then abusing drugs or alcohol to escape the pain they feel.
Laws to protect young people from this fate arose out of our purest altruistic impulses. Unfortunately, across most of the U.S., for many years, these impulses were expressed in policies that lumped status offenders---whose being out of place is by definition not criminal, and would be of no consequence if they were adults---with juvenile delinquents and even adult delinquents. Today, in most places, the laws are somewhat kinder, but these young people who need services the most are still those least likely to receive them, because they are doing their best to be invisible. They're on the run.
Runaway Stats
Because they're running, runaway kids are hard to count. We know how many are reported as missing, but we know that many more never are reported. Still, national statistics can give us some idea of the magnitude of the problem.
According to the National Runaway Switchboard, a nonprofit organization supported in part by the federal Administration for Children, Youth, and Families:
- 1 in 7 kids between the ages of 10 and 18 will run away at least once. Some will return within a few days, while others remain on the streets never to return.
- Some 1.3 million youth are living on the streets each day in the United States of America. This number combines runaway, throwaway, and homeless young people, and may include some youthful illegal immigrants who are on their own. It's been used by a number of reliable sources over the last 10 years, and it probably hasn't changed much in that time. And as you may know, current estimates range from 1500 to 1700 a year in Montgomery County alone.
- Assaults, illness, or suicide, according to the National Runaway Switchboard, will take the lives of 5,000 runaway youth in the U.S. this year and every year.
- The Runaway Switchboard kept track of its young callers in 2000. Not all of them were runaways, though the majority were; some just wanted to talk about it. 75% of callers were female and only 25% were male. (Statistics from the National Network for Runaway and Homeless Youth and the General Accounting Office also show a majority of females, though the difference is not this high. Girls are more likely to be reported missing. At the same time, the majority of street kids-long-term homeless-are boys.)
- 42% of callers said they had run away before, even if they were not on the lam at the time they called. Repeated runaways by the same young people are one of the things the statistics have a hard time accounting for.
- Most callers were between 14 and 17, though 8% were 11 to 13. (As you can see, I was precocious.)
- 45% stayed away from home for less than three days, 15% for 4 to 7 days, 21% for 1 to 4 weeks, and 16% for 1 to 6 months.
- 36% cited family dynamics as the reason they were running away or thinking about it.
- 20% cited school problems, and 13% cited peer problems, often having to do with school.
Now as I said, this sample includes callers who did not in fact run away. In two 1997 studies of runaways and homeless young people conducted for the Department of Health and Human Services:
- 46% reported having been physically abused;
- 38% reported being emotionally abused; and
- 17% reported being sexually exploited.
In a 1992 study of homeless young people conducted by the National Association of Social Workers, 66% reported having an alcoholic parent and 25% reported parental drug abuse. About 27% were in trouble with the law. A separate, NIH study found that rates of major depression, conduct disorder, and post-traumatic stress among runaways were three times as high as for their peers. It almost goes without saying that for the most part they were not experiencing success in school.
These are the things that happen before they run. We all know what happens afterwards, if they do not benefit from fast, positive intervention. It isn't Peter Pan and Wendy.
HIV/AIDS, to use just one example, was estimated in 1990 as 2 to 10 times more prevalent among homeless young people than among other teens. That makes sense because gay and lesbian youths, and those who are questioning their sexual identity, are particularly likely to experience the level of misery that makes "anyplace but this" seem like a great idea. And as you know if you saw Friday's Washington Post, after a long downswing, the rate of new HIV cases is returning to 1980s levels, especially among gay black males---who are being infected at 3 times the rate for all gay men and almost 6 times the rate for whites. The article estimated that 32% of young black gay males are now HIV-positive.
HIV infection and running away are also both closely linked with abuse of alcohol and other drugs - and kids who are drug dependent are those most likely to engage in survival sex and be sexually victimized. It's a vicious circle.
Now again, bear in mind that most of these numbers combine categories such as runaway, throwaway, and homeless. A 1990 study by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found that 22% of those usually identified as runaways were actually "thrown away" by parents who would not or could not care for them. The last term, homeless, usually describes kids who stay away for considerable periods of time.
All of these young people are greatly at risk for a lot of rotten outcomes. But they're also at promise. Let me return from this bleak statistical picture to the point I made earlier on. These young people are more like other young people - the lucky ones, like yours and mine - then they are unlike them. Each of them has unique gifts, talents, and skills, people somewhere who care about them, contributions to make, and a role in society that nobody else can fill in exactly the same way. They are the future. That's why projects like Operation Runaway are so important. The United States of America does not have a single child or young person to spare.
What a Community Owes to Its Kids
While it's difficult to keep categories like "runaway" and "homeless youth" separate and air tight, in the case of an individual child and her or his community, there are three fairly distinct phases -- before, during, and after an absence from home. In terms of services and the systems that provide them, these translate into prevention, intervention, and re-integration.
At CWLA, we like to say that the well-being of our children and young people is everybody's business. That means that each of these phases presents tasks for communities, not just for parents. So what does a community owe its children, if it expects to hold onto them and their precious potential? It owes them, first, a wide array of opportunities to make connections. Kids who break and run are rootless kids, or those who have been uprooted. The roots and rootlets that hold most of us and our children in place operate as a web of concentric circles, with intricately linked cross-threads.
A. Prevention
Parents and siblings are at the heart of the web, but as children grow up, they range more and more widely across the other circles of the community, beginning with extended family members, neighbors, friends, teachers, formal and informal mentors, on to fellow members of a congregation or other faith community, youth workers, & the people who staff community organizations: Boys and Girls Clubs, YW and YMCAs, scouts, ethnic & cultural organizations, youth orchestras, sports teams. Public libraries are also part of the web of community, and fire stations, and neighborhood merchants, who may offer Safe Places (with or without the capital letters) -- just places to come in out of the rain where kids know they're welcome.
In time, some of these same businesses and organizations may offer jobs that allow growing youngsters to experience their competence outside of school and enjoy a taste of self-sufficiency. A friendly, positive law enforcement presence, such as that afforded by community policing, and familiar doctors, dentists, family counselors, clinics, and hospitals are also part of this web. Ideally, as children grow older and become more independent of their parents, they move deeper into this web of community connections and they experience increasingly reciprocal interactions, giving as well as taking in a variety of social contexts.
Isn't this what all our kids need? A web of supports so tightly woven that it acts like a trampoline, so they can practice launching themselves toward interdependence a little at a time, and come down again safely as often as they need to. Opportunities to belong, to succeed, to contribute, to make mistakes without unbearable consequences, and to be heard; positive relationships with peers and also with a variety of adults who are modeling a range of possible future roles.
Unfortunately, parents who are the least successful at providing the basic supports at the center of this web are also the least likely to model effective ways to negotiate other systems. So these systems have to reach out to the kids -- or at least to respond in positive and nurturing ways when the kids bump into them. Since schools are the system that every child and family has to deal with in some way, they carry a particularly heavy responsibility for linking across the web with other systems and institutions.
If the schools and other systems that support families are linked together in a web, a touch at one part of the web should be felt in other circles from the center to the perimeter. Spiders got this principle down about a million years ago, but we're still figuring it out.
The webs we weave are seldom dense and sticky enough, so a lot of our kids don't stick. And when prevention fails --- when a young person's misery mounts to the point that flight looks like the only answer - the time for prevention is past. We're down to intervention.
B. Intervention
The early interventions that need to be available cover the range of areas where trouble might become apparent. If the trouble is in the family relationship, we want parent education, counseling, and treatment for health, mental health, and behavioral health conditions. Concrete supports like safe, affordable housing, food assistance, health care, child care, job training, and job matching can also make a home healthier for kids. Sometimes, when a child has been harmed or is in clear danger, the child welfare system may need to step in.
If the child is failing in school, or isn't fitting in socially - if she's a loner, a bully, or the butt of bullying - the school system needs to act, in cooperation with the parents and with mental health systems of care. If a child's health or nutrition appears to be neglected, the child welfare system may be alerted. If she or he knows about a hotline, or learns about one from a peer, she may be able to summon help for herself. Maybe a report is made and the police will be involved.
The first thing that has to happen in every case, once the child is safe from harm, the parents have been notified, and basic needs have been met, is a coordinated assessment that identifies service needs in various domains. Obviously, the sooner this happens, the better for the child and the community.
Whatever form intervention takes, whatever quarter help comes from, it's a good thing. But as you all know, it is not enough just to prevent the child from running or to bring him back if he does run. If the underlying problem isn't solved, he may run again; choose fight instead of flight, so the outcome is violent; flirt with death through drugs or crazy driving, or embrace it outright through suicide. Our society offers a wide array of ugly alternatives, and no shortage of negative role models. Our array of interventions needs to be even more diverse than those alternatives. The options we offer need to be attractive, so kids and families want to use them, and they need to be connected. No one system has all the answers.
C. Re-Entry
OK, let's assume our intervention has been successful. A child has either been kept at home and provided with support, or returned home after a supported negotiation with parents or caregivers. How do we welcome her back? She and her family are going to need support across those interlocking formal and informal systems I itemized earlier. Their isolation from these circles, whether self-imposed or not, may well have been close to the root of the original problem. But the systems' isolation from each other is also to blame. Yes, they are connecting. I know that in Montgomery County the Operation Runaway Community Coalition has been meeting monthly for 10 years.
That's great. But is everybody represented there who needs to be? What happens between meetings? What would it take to put this issue where it needs to be, in terms of resources and public awareness? Does every sector --- school, police, health, mental health, neighborhood organizations, the faith community, the business community -- have a positive and clearly defined role at each phase: prevention, intervention, and re-entry?
Let me raise a different question. What is the role of the youth peer group, and of the young person - the potential runaway or returned runaway - in planning and implementing strategies across the web to make things work better? These young people --- who are not intrinsically different from other young people - deserve a voice in every deliberation. As a matter of fact, runaways are young people who have already voted for self-determination with their feet. They have shown us that they would rather be in danger than under duress. They want and deserve a voice in everything that concerns them. No re-entry plan is going to be successful unless it actively engages the young person.
What Works
Montgomery County can be a model for the nation in many respects. The Collaboration Council for Children, Youth and Families, in which Operation Runaway participates, is the kind of framework that every community needs to meet child and family needs in a coordinated fashion. But Montgomery County hasn't got it all together. No community does. I'd like to share just a few ideas from programs around the U.S., in prevention, intervention, and re-entry, that taken all together might add up to the kind of community young people and families deserve. We do know what works. Proven programs abound.
Prevention/Early Intervention
Every community has an array of strengths and resources, but they can't be fully effective unless they are integrated and unless people know what they do. One of my favorite models for linking young people to their community is the youth asset mapping process that has been done in several New York City neighborhoods and other communities around the country. These projects hire a diverse group of young people, for the summer or after school during the year, to knock on every door in every non-residential neighborhood with a questionnaire about what the business or organization does and how young people might be involved. Later, they fed the data they had gathered into a computerized geographical interface system that constructed a detailed map of activities, job opportunities, and services. The teams produced an asset inventory on a scale that had never been seen before, as well as a calendar of events for the year ahead. They also identified gaps where supports and services needed to be, and participated in making plans to fill them.
The most important output, however, was the impact on the young people themselves. I heard some of them describe how they felt going into local businesses with a job to do, with a sense of legitimacy they had never experienced before in their lives. Though many of them started out feeling shy and awkward, they ended the summer feeling that they belonged to their community and their community belonged to them. This is primary prevention.
The National Runaway Switchboard, which I mentioned earlier, comes in later along the continuum from prevention to intervention.
How many of you are familiar with the Switchboard?
Its toll-free, 24-hour number is 1/800/621-4000, and it offers confidential, nonjudgmental support to young people and parents both. Staff members will relay messages between parents & kids, and they can arrange for free bus tickets after the two sides have talked to each other.
Intervention
Primary prevention, as I have said, is the job of the whole community, and it's what we do for all of our kids. The Switchboard is terrific, but because it's nationwide, it's not hands-on. The best local programs that focus on runaways, however, like our own Operation Runaway, cover the gamut from prevention to re-entry.
Bridge Over Troubled Waters, a CWLA member agency that was founded in Boston in 1970, has been the model for many others across the U.S. It goes to the young people where they are, coordinating with schools, police, and other neighborhood institutions around prevention and putting workers on the street to intervene early. Pimps and drug dealers look for runaways to exploit in bus stations and coffeehouses and local lockups, so Bridge workers are in those places too. They offer the services kids need in a respectful and low-key fashion, and the word on the street is good. A girl may come because she has a toothache that one of the program's 200, mostly professional volunteers will treat for free. A counselor -- a volunteer or one of the program's 45 employees -- may invite her to lunch soon afterwards to do a lot of listening and a little informal assessment. The young woman may gradually decide to trust someone and stick around. The program has no shelter beds, but it can arrange housing with local families. If returning home is not an option, the runaway may participate in the Bridge's two-stage transitional living program, which has room for 34. She is on her way to claiming, and being claimed by, a community, which may or may not be the one she originally left.
Miami Bridge was founded in 1975 as a project of Catholic Charities in Miami, Florida . It serves over 600 young people every year, with 48 shelter beds, 2 Miami-Dade public schools, and a holistic array of services. The organization has interagency agreements with local schools, clinics, hospitals, and mental health agencies, so young people get a thorough assessment in each domain when they enter the program, followed by whatever help they need. On the front end, Miami Bridge provides crisis mediation and counseling to 1100 families every year. Miami Bridge is also part of the nationwide Safe Place program (born at the Louisville, Kentucky, YMCA in 1983), and just added 13 fire stations to its network. Six months after its services are completed, 85% of the young people have had no involvement with the law and 90% are at home with their families or in another safe situation. [MB informant: Stephanie Solovei]
In the West, Tucson's Our Town Family Center - a CWLA member agency, like both of the preceding programs -- has a street outreach team that includes four women, three Latinos, and two teens who are former runaways, 17-year-old David and 15-year-old Ruth.
I mentioned earlier that a majority of runaways are girls. In spite of this fact, most of the programs that deal with young people who are out of bounds in one way or another have traditionally been geared to boys. They ignore girls' different developmental needs, their different vulnerabilities, and their different strengths. Girls are also more likely to be locked up in secure settings when they run away because of the patriarchal urge to "protect them." Fortunately, some programs, like the PACE Center for Girls in Florida, are structured specifically around female strengths and needs.
Let me mention here, as an aside, that CWLA will soon be collaborating with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, under an OJJDP grant, to establish a National Girls Institute that promotes gender-appropriate practice for young women and girls in all our systems.
Re-Entry
The third phase is re-entry. When it comes to re-integrating runaways into community, if returning to their family is not an option, foster care with a strong independent living component followed by transitional housing seems to be the best model. If they are able to go home, they and their parents will need support to work through the difficulties that led to their leaving. The best model here is probably the wraparound, system of care model that originated with the mental health system and is now bringing systems together around the U.S. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and many other communities have demonstrated that wraparound works even with severely challenged young people. But it takes widespread and willing collaboration. And it takes resources.
Public policy
Good services cost money. Collaboration is sometimes seen as doing more with less, but most people who have been involved in successful systems integration will tell you that it works best when there's new money on the table. Then resources can belong to the collaborative; they can be ours instead of mine and yours. People can move ahead instead of digging in to protect their own turf. Besides, if you're going to go out on a regular basis to meet the folks across town and conduct common business for the common good, you'll probably need to hire someone to cover what you would have been doing otherwise.
Some of the most successful community collaborations I know began with grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, like the one that led to Wraparound Milwaukee, the Alaska Youth Care Initiative, and the many other wonderful systems of care initiatives. When the challenge is to bring people together and keep them together---and it usually is---money makes great glue.
Good services cost money. (Did I say that already?) And while we need to cultivate every possible source of funding close to home, nothing else can have quite the impact of sound national policy backed by significant federal resources. That's why CWLA challenges all its member agencies, and I challenge you today, to write advocacy into your job description and that of every service provider you hire. Advocacy isn't just nice: It's necessary. For one thing, you can't empower the adults and young people you work with to be their own advocates if they don't see you advocating for them. Actions speak louder than words.
This year, as every year, CWLA has a legislative agenda. We know that achieving our legislative goals is likely to be harder than ever this year because $1.35 trillion has already been taken off the table for tax cuts. We're having dessert first, and we may not like the meal that follows. But that deal is done. We will, we must continue to ask for what we need to serve children, young people, and families. They deserve nothing less.
The Act to Leave No Child Behind, introduced on May 23 by Senator Christopher Dodd and Rep. George Miller, has 12 titles that include some of CWLA's chief legislative priorities, including the Child Protection/Alcohol and Drug Partnership Act, the Younger Americans Act, the Child Protection Services Improvement Act, and the Social Services Block Grant Restoration Act. All four have great importance to the children and families you serve.
I've already spoken about the role substance abuse plays, whether it's parental abuse creating the situations children run from, or the children's own involvement --- and in many cases, both. We know, from a survey of CWLA members that we conducted a few years ago, that agencies are able to arrange treatment for less than a third of the families who enter the child welfare system with identified alcohol and other drug involvement. That means that more than two-thirds of these families go without the treatment they need to keep their families together. Be sure your elected representatives know we have an answer to this challenge: S. 2435, H.R. 5081: the Child Protection/Alcohol and Drug Partnership Act.
The Younger Americans Act would fund precisely the kind of positive youth development services that can bind young people to their communities and welcome and reclaim them if they do run away. The Child Protection Services Improvement Act would fund training for the workers in the child welfare system and relieve understaffing. When the dedicated people who work one on one with children, young people, and families leave to take other jobs, they tell us that lack of training, enormous caseloads, and high stress have much more to do with their decision than low pay - though salaries matter too. The Social Services Block Grant Restoration Act would provide $2.38 million so states could use TANF money more flexibly to provide needed services, relieving the financial stresses that push many families into the crisis zone.
Advocacy is not optional - and CWLA makes it easy to be an advocate. Just go to our web site, www.cwla.org. Look for Advocacy, on the left, then click on Kids Advocate Online. You'll find everything you need to weigh in on these and other critical policy matters.
Recap and Conclusion
Before I introduce the distinguished panel of judges who are up next on your program, let me briefly recap the points I want you to remember.
First, kids who run away are kids like other kids, with gifts, talents, and contributions that society needs. If their primary bonds aren't holding, systems outside the family may be able to strengthen them, or they may offer other connections that provide safety and opportunity. To do that well, we have to connect the connections.
Second, there are numerous models, here in Montgomery County and around the U.S., that offer healthy alternatives to life on the street and either reunify families or prepare young people for responsible interdependence. The challenges come in engaging all the partners, taking good programs to scale, and finding the resources to maintain them.
Third, and finally, successful local programs are grounded in good public policy at the national level. If you care about kids and families, advocacy is not optional.
I know you do care about kids and families. You are showing it by your presence here today, and by the work you do every day. Teenagers and young adults are leading responsible, satisfying lives and realizing their amazing promise here and in other cities because of the work you do. On their behalf, I thank you. You are American heroes, every man and woman of you. You are my heroes.
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