Hitting home: how the runaway experience haunts adults.

• Author: Blaha, Maureen
• Position: Life in America - Report

IN MY PERFECT world, there would be no such thing as a runaway youth. The young people who decide to leave home every day would have the resources available to help them deal with the triggers that cause them to flee their circumstances. Yet, the fact remains that between 1,600,000 and 2,800,000 youth run away yearly in the U.S. Life on the streets is hard as runaways, throwaways, and homeless youth face crime, drug abuse, sexual exploitation, and prostitution, among other concerns. Mental issues and health problems also put youth who are on the streets at risk.

Statistics from a 2010 Urban Institute research brief show that one in five youth runs away before reaching age 18, and of that 20% who do run, half of them run away two or more times. As we examine current knowledge on this problem, one thing noticeably absent from the research is data that reveals the long-term effects on adults who ran away as adolescents. How do former runaways compare to nonrunaways? Do they experience greater health, economic, and legal issues? If armed with this knowledge, what impact could we have in curbing the runaway crisis?

The National Runaway Switchboard (NRS) has released the the first national study that addresses this issue: "Runaway Youth Longitudinal Study 2011," which found that adolescents who run away from home experience more health issues, economic woes, and run-ins with law enforcement officials as adults than their peers who do not run away from home. The differences between runaway and nonrunaways in terms of demographics and other risk factors also are highlighted in this study. Our goal is to identify long-term effects of running away from home so we can better educate parents, teachers, and other adults to get involved, address the issues, and ultimately prevent a runaway situation.

The study used a nationally representative sample of more than 15,000 individuals who were interviewed at four points in time over a 15-year span. The data was collected using a clustered school sampling design by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Individuals first were interviewed when they were in grades seven through 12 during the 1994-95 school year, and were reinterviewed the following year for the second wave of the survey. The third wave was collected when the respondents were aged 18-26 in 2001-02. During this wave, they were asked if they ever had run away from home as an adolescent, a key variable in the study. The most recent...