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Vocapedia > Media > USA > NYT > Illustrations >
2008-2009
Erik T. Johnson
Letters
Saving Runaways, With Law and Love
November 2, 2009
The New York Times
To the Editor:
Re “Recession Drives Surge
in Youth Runaways” and “For
Runaways on the Street, Sex Buys Survival” (“Running in the Shadows” series,
front page, Oct. 26 and 27):
I would like to add a few points to your excellent articles about runaways.
While it may be true that “most of the estimated 1.6 million children who run
away each year return home within a week,” many of the children who do stay on
the streets remain there for years, and many of them will die on the streets or
become institutionalized.
You mention “girls” when referring to child prostitutes. As a man who was
arrested at 11 years old for prostitution, I know that this issue does not
discriminate by gender. Many pedophiles and predators do not care as much about
the gender of the victim as the age.
Though the system now identifies children as “victims,” it still treats them as
criminals. There is much to be done to help these kids beyond criminalizing
them.
Government agencies — foster care, human services and criminal justice — are not
currently capable of helping and inspiring these children off the streets.
Nonprofit organizations, many of which are closing because of the recession, and
caring individuals will be the lifeline for these kids. These organizations are
responsible for saving my life after being on the street from age 10 to 22.
If we all just dedicate a little of ourselves by sharing our worlds, we can help
inspire and mentor these kids emotionally, academically and socially. Many are
damaged and have years of spiritual healing ahead of them.
But you will find that we just want to be loved — and to have a secure home and
a loving family.
Justin Early
New York, Oct. 27, 2009
The writer is a former board member of the National Network for Youth and the
author of “StreetChild: An Unpaved Passage.”
•
To the Editor:
What you describe as “survival sex” in “For Runaways on the Street, Sex Buys
Survival” is actually human trafficking, a serious federal crime that involves
the buying and selling of human beings — in this case, girls.
Under the New York State Human Trafficking Act, the purchasers of children in
the sex trade, rarely arrested and a category of exploiters who are generally
invisible and escape scrutiny, could be charged with a felony.
In addition to taking cues from the groundbreaking programs in Dallas for
runaways vulnerable to pimps and traffickers, New York law enforcement must at
least begin to use its own anti-trafficking law, especially the provisions on
demand, if it is serious about tackling the brutal exploitation of girls and
women for profit by traffickers, pimps and “johns.” Taina Bien-Aimé
Executive Director
Equality Now
New York, Oct. 27, 2009
•
To the Editor:
There is no question the troubled economy has resulted in a growing number of
homeless youth. This year alone the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center has experienced
a 30 percent increase in the number of young people turning to us for housing,
food, clothing and other support services.
But the article doesn’t mention a startling fact — a hugely disproportionate
number of homeless youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
According to a 2006 report by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 20
percent to 40 percent of homeless young people are lesbian, gay, bisexual or
transgender.
In addition to the challenges all homeless youths experience, these youths often
have the additional burden of rejection not only from their family, but also
from society, simply because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Curtis F. Shepard
Director
Children, Youth and Family Services
L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center
Los Angeles, Oct. 26, 2009
•
To the Editor:
It is important to note that not all runaways come from severely dysfunctional
or violent households. In fact, most do not. Many families are simply unable to
effectively cope with stress and conflict, and the child sees no alternative but
to run.
At the Bridge, we have seen tens of thousands of runaways in our 39 years, and
most want to return home. In fact, the most common desire expressed is for a
caring adult in their lives that they can trust. Usually, that can be found
within their family or extended family, but often that means a lot of counseling
and support.
The problem arises when children in crisis have no safe place to go and end up
on the street exposing themselves to the chilling consequences your articles so
aptly report. What works are safe places for runaways to go to find not only
safety, but also professional counseling and care to help the child and his or
her family work through their issues. If home is still not a solution, foster
care and other alternatives are considered.
The federal response to runaway children is woefully inadequate. More federal
dollars are spent on abstinence education than on the principal federal program
providing crisis shelter, counseling and family reunification.
Ed Murphy
Executive Director
The Bridge for Youth
Saving Runaways, With
Law and Love, NYT, 2.11.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/opinion/l02runaway.html
Running in the Shadows
For Runaways, Sex Buys Survival
October 27, 2009
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA
ASHLAND, Ore. — She ran away from her group home in Medford, Ore., and spent
weeks sleeping in parks and under bridges. Finally, Nicole Clark, 14 years old,
grew so desperate that she accepted a young man’s offer of a place to stay. The
price would come later.
They had sex, and he soon became her boyfriend. Then one day he threatened to
kick her out if she did not have sex with several of his friends in exchange for
money.
She agreed, fearing she had no choice. “Where was I going to go?” said Nicole,
now 17 and living here, just down the Interstate from Medford. That first
exchange of money for sex led to a downward spiral of prostitution that lasted
for 14 months, until she escaped last year from a pimp who she said often locked
her in his garage apartment for months.
“I didn’t know the town, and the police would just send me back to the group
home,” Nicole said, explaining why she did not cut off the relationship once her
first boyfriend became a pimp and why she did not flee prostitution when she had
the chance. “I’d also fallen for the guy. I felt trapped in a way I can’t really
explain.”
Most of the estimated 1.6 million children who run away each year return home
within a week. But for those who do not, the desperate struggle to survive often
means selling their bodies.
Nearly a third of the children who flee or are kicked out of their homes each
year engage in sex for food, drugs or a place to stay, according to a variety of
studies published in academic and public health journals. But this kind of
dangerous barter system can quickly escalate into more formalized prostitution,
when money changes hands. And then, child welfare workers and police officials
say, it becomes extremely difficult to help runaways escape the streets. Many
become more entangled in abusive relationships, and the law begins to view them
more as teenage criminals than under-age victims.
Estimates of how many children are involved in prostitution vary wildly —
ranging from thousands to tens of thousands. More solid numbers do not exist, in
part because the Department of Justice has yet to study the matter even though
Congress authorized it to do so in 2005 as part of a nationwide study of the
illegal commercial sex industry.
But many child welfare advocates and officials in government and law enforcement
say that while the data is scarce, they believe that the problem of prostituted
children has grown, especially as the Internet has made finding clients easier.
“It’s definitely worsening,” said Sgt. Kelley O’Connell, a detective who until
this year ran the Boston Police Department’s human-trafficking unit, echoing a
sentiment conveyed in interviews with law enforcement officials from more than
two dozen cities. “Gangs used to sell drugs,” she said. “Now many of them have
shifted to selling girls because it’s just as lucrative but far less risky.”
Atlanta, which is one of the only cities where local officials have tried to
keep data on the problem, has seen the number of teenage prostitutes working in
the city grow to 334 in February from 251 in August 2007.
The barriers to rescuing these children are steep: state cuts to mental heath
services, child welfare agencies incapable of preventing them from running away,
a dearth of residential programs where the children can receive counseling.
After years of abuse, trauma and neglect, the children also tend to trust no
one. The longer they are on the streets, experts say, the more likely they are
to become involved in crime and uncooperative with the authorities.
“These kids enter prostitution and they literally disappear,” said Bradley
Myles, deputy director of the Polaris Project, a nonprofit organization based in
Washington that directly serves children involved in prostitution and other
trafficking victims. “And in those rare moments that they reappear, it’s in
these revolving-door situations where they’re handled by people who have no idea
or training in how to help them. So the kids end up right back on the street.”
The Flip Interview
That revolving door is what an F.B.I. agent, Dan Garrabrant, desperately hoped
to stop in Interview Room One at the Atlantic City Police Department on Sept. 5,
2006.
Conducting what the police call a “flip” interview, Mr. Garrabrant was trying
every tactic he knew to persuade a petite 16-year-old girl named Roxanne L. from
Queens, N.Y., to stop being a prostitute and to inform, or flip, on her pimp.
Sending the girl home was not the answer. Home was where her mentally ill,
crack-addicted mother lived. Home was where the problems had started.
But Mr. Garrabrant also knew that she would flee if he sent her to a youth
shelter. And with her would go his best chance at prosecuting the real criminal,
her pimp.
A social worker for six years before joining the F.B.I. almost two decades ago,
Mr. Garrabrant has been honored by anti-trafficking experts, prosecutors and the
police as one of the best flip interviewers in the country.
On this day, however, he was getting nowhere, according to a recording of the
interview and his notes.
While Roxanne had all the signs of being controlled by a pimp — a tattoo with
initials on her neck, a rehearsed script about how she was new to the work — she
adamantly denied working for anyone.
Mr. Garrabrant had only an hour before the local police would take Roxanne to a
shelter. Trying to ease the mood, he started by asking her why she had run away
from home. She told him she had been raped by a relative when she was 12 years
old. At 14, she left home because her mother’s boyfriend had become abusive.
Soon, running out of time, he zeroed in.
“What’s the worst part about working the streets?” he asked.
“Honestly,” Roxanne said, giving him a cold stare, “having to look at the tricks
and tell if they are cops or not.”
“So a pimp never approached you and tried to turn you out?” Mr. Garrabrant
asked.
“Yeah, they tried, but I ran,” she said, maintaining that she was “renegading,”
or working without a pimp.
Mr. Garrabrant’s task was to get Roxanne to consider leaving her pimp without
forcing her to admit she had one. He needed to push hard enough to break her
from her rehearsed script, without descending into a frustrating game of wits, a
contest in liar’s poker. And he had to do all this at exactly the wrong time and
place — at the police station after an arrest for solicitation, when the girl
felt most panicked and most angry about being treated like a criminal.
“Look, I want to help you,” he said, after several failed attempts to get her to
acknowledge her pimp. He told her that he might be able to enter her into a
residential program in California that offered counseling and classes to girls
leaving prostitution.
“Yeah, I know,” she said, as she looked down and pensively picked at her nails.
“Give me some time,” Mr. Garrabrant pleaded as he handed her a card and asked
her to keep it handy. With no time left, he released Roxanne back to the local
police, who took her to the youth shelter.
Four hours later, she disappeared. Seventeen days after that, according to the
F.B.I, she was found stabbed to death by the pimp she had so adamantly denied
existed.
In one of her pockets she had Mr. Garrabrant’s card.
“Two days, that’s all I needed to get her to stay away from her pimp and I think
things would’ve ended up differently,” said Mr. Garrabrant, shaking his head in
frustration. “I still don’t understand how these guys loop these girls in so
far.”
A Dangerous Dependency
A runaway’s relationship with a pimp does not occur by accident. It takes work.
After using court records to compile a database of over a hundred convicted
pimps and where each is incarcerated, The New York Times wrote letters to each
more than two years ago. In the ensuing interviews by phone and in letters, more
than two dozen convicted and still incarcerated pimps described the complicated
roles they played as father figure, landlord, boss and boyfriend to the girls
who worked for them. They said they went after girls with low self-esteem, prior
sexual experience and a lack of options.
“With the young girls, you promise them heaven, they’ll follow you to hell,”
said Harvey Washington, a pimp who began serving a four-year sentence in Arizona
in 2005 for pandering a 17-year-old and three adult prostitutes. “It all depends
on her being so love-drunk off of me that she will do anything for me.”
While most of the pimps said they prefer adult women because teenage runaways
involve more legal risks, they added that juveniles fetch higher prices from
clients and are far easier to manipulate.
Virtually all the juveniles who become involved in prostitution are runaways and
become pimp-controlled, according to law enforcement officials and social
workers. Built of desperation and fear, the bonds they form with their pimps are
difficult to break. Some girls continue working for pimps even after the pimps
are incarcerated.
“The problem is that there is no methadone for a bad relationship,” said Rachel
Lloyd, a former child prostitute and the director of Girls Educational and
Mentoring Services, a program in New York that helps girls escape and stay away
from prostitution.
The pimps view themselves as talent managers, not exploiters.
“My job is to make sure she has what she needs, personal hygiene, get her nails
done, take her to buy an outfit, take her out to eat, make her feel wanted,”
said another pimp, Antoin Thurman, who was sentenced in 2006 to three years for
pandering and related charges in Buckeye, Ariz. “But I keep the money.”
Wayne Banks Jr., a pimp serving at least 40 years in Hazelton, W. Va., for the
sex trafficking of a minor and related charges, wrote that the girls have to be
convinced that the pimp is best equipped to handle their clients and finances.
“Seems more despicable to me to give something so valuable away as opposed to
selling it,” he wrote, describing his pitch to persuade girls that prostitution
was a smart business decision.
When recruiting, some pimps said they prowled homeless shelters, bus stations
and shopping malls or posed in newspaper advertisements as photographers and
talent scouts. Others said they worked Internet chat rooms and phone-sex lines.
“I’ll look for a younger female with a backpack,” said Mr. Thurman, describing
how he used to drive near schools after hours. “I’m thinking she’s leaving home,
she’s leaving for a reason, she had a fight with her parents or she just wants
to leave home.”
Mr. Banks wrote that he preferred using “finders’ fees”: $100 to anyone who sent
a prospect his way. His only condition was that the girl had to be told up front
that he was a pimp.
Runaways are especially attractive recruits because most are already engaging in
survival sex for a place to stay, said Evelyn Diaz, who is serving a nine-year
sentence in a federal prison in Connecticut for three counts of sex trafficking
of minors.
“Some become very loyal to you since you take them under your wing,” she wrote.
Controlling girls through beatings or threats was common, but coercion was not
an effective basis for a lasting relationship, most pimps emphasized.
“Everything about the game is by choice, not by force,” said Bryant Bell, who is
serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence in Georgia after pleading guilty in 2002
to helping run a prostitution ring that involved girls as young as 10 years old.
For those girls not already engaged in survival sex, the grooming process was
gradual and calculated. At first, the sex is consensual. Before long, the girl
is asked to turn occasional tricks to help pay bills.
“I might start by asking her to help me by sleeping with a friend,” Mr.
Washington said in a telephone interview. “Then I push her from there.”
A Better System
Ten years ago, the Dallas Police Department found an average of fewer than 10
minors working as prostitutes every year, along with one pimp working with them.
In 2007, the department found 119 girls involved in prostitution and arrested 44
pimps.
The city’s child prostitution problem has grown over time. But the bigger reason
for the change is how the department handles the cases, using a special unit and
some unusual techniques.
Previously, said Sgt. Byron A. Fassett, who leads the department’s effort, girls
working as prostitutes were handled as perpetrators rather than sexual assault
victims. If a 45-year-old man had sex with a 14-year-old girl and no money
changed hands, she was likely to get counseling and he was likely to get jail
time for statutory rape, Sergeant Fassett said. If the same man left $80 on the
table after having sex with her, she would probably be locked up for
prostitution and he would probably go home with a fine as a john.
The department’s flip interviews almost always failed, and even if they worked,
there was no place to put the girls to receive treatment. Officers resisted
investigating what they viewed as a nuisance, not a crime. Prosecutors regularly
refused the cases against pimps because the girls made for shaky witnesses and
unsympathetic plaintiffs.
Frustrated with this system, Sergeant Fassett started combing through old case
files, looking for patterns. One stuck out: 80 percent of the prostituted
children the department had handled had run away from home at least four or more
times a year.
“It dawned on me, if you want to effectively deal with teen prostitutes, you
need to look for repeat runaways,” he said.
In 2005, Sergeant Fassett created the “High Risk Victim” unit in the Dallas
Police Department, which flags any juvenile in the city who runs away from home
four or more times in a given year. About 200 juveniles per year fit that
description. If one of those children is picked up by the police anywhere in the
country, the child is directed back to Sergeant Fassett’s unit, which
immediately begins investigating the juvenile’s background.
The unit’s strength is timing. If the girls are arrested for prostitution, they
are at their least cooperative. So the unit instead targets them for such minor
offenses as truancy or picks them up as high-risk victims, speaking to them when
their guard is down. Only later, as trust builds, do officers and social workers
move into discussions of prostitution.
Repeat runaways are not put in juvenile detention but in a special city shelter
for up to a month, receiving counseling.
Three quarters of the girls who get treatment do not return to prostitution.
The results of the Dallas system are clear: in the past five years, the Dallas
County district attorney’s office has on average indicted and convicted or won
guilty pleas from over 90 percent of the pimps arrested. In virtually all of
those cases, the children involved in the prostitution testified against their
pimps, according to the prosecutor’s office. Over half of those convictions
started as cases involving girls who were picked up by the police not for
prostitution but simply as repeat runaways.
In 2007, Congress nearly approved a proposal to spend more than $55 million for
cities to create pilot programs across the country modeled on the Dallas system.
But after a dispute with President George W. Bush over the larger federal
budget, the plan was dropped and Congress never appropriated the money.
For Runaways, Sex Buys Survival, NYT,
27.10.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/us/27runaways.html
Running in the Shadows
Recession Drives
Surge in Youth Runaways
October 26, 2009
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA
MEDFORD, Ore. — Dressed in soaked green pajamas, Betty Snyder, 14, huddled
under a cold drizzle at the city park as several older boys decided what to do
with her.
Betty said she had run away from home a week earlier after a violent argument
with her mother. Shivering and sullen-faced, she vowed that she was not going to
sleep by herself again behind the hedges downtown, where older homeless men and
methamphetamine addicts might find her.
The boys were also runaways. But unlike them, Betty said, she had been reported
missing to the police. That meant that if the boys let her stay overnight in
their hidden tent encampment by the freeway, they risked being arrested for
harboring a fugitive.
“We keep running into this,” said one of the boys, Clinton Anchors, 18. Over the
past year, he said, he and five other teenagers living together on the streets
had taken under their wings no fewer than 20 children — some as young as 12 —
and taught them how to avoid predators and the police, survive the cold and find
food.
“We always first try to send them home,” said Clinton, who himself ran away from
home at 12. “But a lot of times they won’t go, because things are really bad
there. We basically become their new family.”
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.
In Adrian, Mich., near Detroit, a 16-year-old boy was secretly living alone in
his mother’s apartment, though all the utilities had been turned off after she
was arrested and jailed for violating her parole by bouncing a check at a
grocery store.
In Huntington, W.Va., Steven White, 15, said that after casing a 24-hour
Wal-Mart to see what time each night the cleaning crew finished its rounds, he
began sleeping in a store restroom.
“You’re basically on the lam,” said Steven, who said he had left home because of
physical abuse that increased after his father lost his job this year. “But
you’re a kid, so it’s pretty hard to hide.”
Between Legal and Illegal
Survival on the streets of Medford, a city of 76,000 in southwest Oregon,
requires runaways to walk a fine line between legal and illegal activity, as a
few days with a group of them showed. Even as they sought help from social
service organizations, they guarded their freedom jealously.
Petulant and street savvy, they were children nonetheless. One girl said she
used a butter knife and a library card to break into vacant houses. But after
she began living in one of them, she ate dry cereal for dinner for weeks because
she did not realize that she could use the microwave to boil water for Ramen
noodles. Another girl was childlike enough to suck her thumb, but dangerous
enough to carry a switchblade.
They camped in restricted areas, occasionally shoplifted and regularly smoked
marijuana. But they stayed away from harder drugs or drug dealing, and the older
teenagers fiercely protected the younger runaways from sexual or other physical
threats.
In waking hours, members of the group split their time among a park, a pool hall
and a video-game arcade, sharing cigarettes. When in need, they sometimes
barter: a sleeveless jacket for a blanket, peanut butter for extra lighter fluid
to start campfires on soggy nights.
Betty Snyder, the newcomer in the park, said she had bitten her mother in a
recent fight. She said she often refused to do household chores, which prompted
heated arguments.
“I’m just tired of it all, and I don’t want to be in my house anymore,” she
said, explaining why she had run away. “One month there is money, and the next
month there is none. One day, she is taking it out on me and hitting me, and the
next day she is ignoring me. It’s more stable out here.”
Members of the group said they sometimes made money by picking parking meters or
sitting in front of parking lots, pretending to be the attendant after the real
one leaves. When things get really desperate, they said, they climb into public
fountains to fish out coins late at night. On cold nights, they hide in public
libraries or schools after closing time to sleep.
Many of the runaways said they had fled family conflicts or the strain of their
parents’ alcohol or drug abuse. Others said they left simply because they did
not want to go to school or live by their parents’ rules.
“I can survive fine out here,” Betty said as she brandished a switchblade she
pulled from her dirty sweatshirt pocket. At a nearby picnic table was part of
the world she and the others were trying to avoid: a man with swastikas tattooed
on his neck and an older homeless woman with rotted teeth, holding a pit bull
named Diablo.
But Betty and another 14-year-old, seeming not to notice, went off to play on a
park swing.
Around the country, outreach workers and city officials say they have been
overwhelmed with requests for help from young people in desperate straits.
In Berks County, Pa., the shortage of beds for runaways has led county officials
to consider paying stipends to families willing to offer their couches. At
drop-in centers across the country, social workers describe how runaways
regularly line up when they know the food pantry is being restocked.
In Chicago, city transit workers will soon be trained to help the runaways and
other young people they have been finding in increasing numbers, trying to
escape the cold or heat by riding endlessly on buses and trains.
“Several times a month we’re seeing kids being left by parents who say they
can’t afford them anymore,” said Mary Ferrell, director of the Maslow Project, a
resource center for homeless children and families in Medford. With fewer jobs
available, teenagers are less able to help their families financially. Relatives
and family friends are less likely to take them in.
While federal officials say homelessness over all is expected to rise 10 percent
to 20 percent this year, a federal survey of schools showed a 40 percent
increase in the number of juveniles living on their own last year, more than
double the number in 2003.
At the same time, however, many financially troubled states began sharply
cutting social services last year. Though President Obama’s $787 billion
economic stimulus package includes $1.5 billion to address the problem of
homelessness, state officials and youth advocates say that almost all of that
money will go toward homeless families, not unaccompanied youths.
“As a society, we can pay a dollar to deal with these kids when they first run
away, or 20 times that in a matter of years when they become the adult homeless
or incarcerated population,” said Barbara Duffield, policy director for the
National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.
‘You Traveling Alone?’
Maureen Blaha, executive director of the National Runaway Switchboard, said that
while most runaways, like those in Medford, opt to stay in their hometowns, some
venture farther away and face greater dangers. The farther they get from home
and the longer they stay out, the less money they have and the more likely they
are to take risks with people they have just met, Ms. Blaha said.
“A lot of small-town kids figure they can go to Chicago, San Francisco or New
York because they can disappear there,” she said.
Martin Jaycard, a Port Authority police officer in New York, sees himself as a
last line of defense in preventing that from happening.
Dressed in scraggly blue jeans and an untucked open-collar shirt, Officer
Jaycard, a seven-year police veteran, is part of the Port Authority’s Youth
Services Unit. His job is to catch runaways as they pass through the Port
Authority Bus Terminal, the nation’s busiest.
“You’re the last person these kids want to see,” he said, estimating that his
three-officer unit stops at least one runaway a day at the terminal.
Pausing to look at a girl waiting for a bus to Salt Lake City, Officer Jaycard
noticed a nervous look on her face and the overstuffed suitcases that hinted
more at a life change than a brief stay.
“Hey, how’s it going?” he said to the girl, gently, as he pulled a badge hanging
around his neck from under his shirt. “You traveling alone?”
“Yes,” she replied, without a glimmer of nervousness. “I’m 18,” she quickly
added before being asked.
But the girl carried no identification. The only phone number she could produce
for someone who could verify her age was disconnected. And after noticing that
the last name she gave was different from the one on her bags, the officer took
her upstairs to the police station.
When she arrived, she burst into tears.
“Please, I’m begging you not to send me home,” she pleaded as she sobbed into
her hands. While listening, Officer Jaycard and the social worker on duty began
contacting city officials to investigate her situation, and found her a place at
a city shelter. “You have no idea what my father will do to me for having tried
to run away,” she said, describing severe beatings at home and threats to kill
her if she ever tried to leave.
The girl turned out to be 14 years old, from Queens. Shaking her head in
frustration, she added, “I should have just waited outside the terminal and no
one would have known I was missing.”
In all likelihood, she was right.
Invisible Names
Lacking the training or the expertise to spot runaways, most police officers
would not have stopped the girl waiting for the bus. Even if they had, her name
probably would not have been listed in the federal database called the National
Crime Information Center, or N.C.I.C., which among other things tracks missing
people.
Federal statistics indicate that in more than three-quarters of runaway cases,
parents or caretakers have not reported the child missing, often because they
are angry about a fight or would simply prefer to see a problem child leave the
house. Experts say some parents fear that involving the police will get them or
their children into trouble or put their custody at risk.
And in 16 percent of cases, the local police failed to enter the information
into the federal database, as required under federal law, according to a review
of federal data by The New York Times.
Among the 61,452 names that were reported to the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children from January 2004 to January 2009, there were about 9,625
instances involving children whose missing-persons reports were not entered into
the N.C.I.C., according to the review by The Times. If the names are not in the
national database, then only local police agencies know whom to look for.
Police officials give various reasons for not entering the data. The software is
old and cumbersome, they say, or they have limited resources and need to
prioritize their time. In many cases, the police said, they do not take runaway
reports as seriously as abductions, in part because runaways are often fleeing
family problems. The police also say that entering every report into the federal
database could make a city’s situation appear to be more of a problem than it
is.
But in 267 of the cases around the nation for which the police did not enter a
report into the database, the children remain missing. In 58, they were found
dead.
“If no one knows they’re gone, who is going to look for them?” said Tray
Williams, a spokesman for the Louisiana Office of Child Services, whose job it
was to take care of 17-year-old Cleveland Randall.
On Feb. 6, Cleveland ran away from his foster care center in New Orleans and
took a bus to Mississippi. His social workers reported him missing, but the New
Orleans police failed to enter the report into the N.C.I.C. Ten days later,
Cleveland was found shot to death in Avondale, La.
“These kids might as well be invisible if they aren’t in N.C.I.C.,” said Ernie
Allen, the director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Paradise by Interstate 5
Invisibility, many of the runaways in Medford say, is just what they want.
By midnight, the group decided it was late enough for them to leave the pool
hall and to move around the city discreetly. So they went their separate ways.
Alex Molnar, 18, took the back alleys to a 24-hour laundry to sleep under the
folding tables. If people were still using the machines, he planned on locking
himself in the restroom, placing a sign on the front saying “Out of Service.”
On the other side of the city, Alex Hughes, 16, took side streets to a secret
clearing along Interstate 5.
On colder nights, he and Clinton Anchors have built a fire in a long shallow
trench, eventually covering it with dirt to create a heated mound where they
could put their blankets.
Building a lean-to with a tarp and sticks, Clinton lifted his voice above the
roar of the tractor-trailers barreling by just feet away. He said they called
the spot “paradise” because the police rarely checked for them there.
“Even if they do, Betty is not with us, so that’s good,” he added, explaining
that she had found a friend willing to lend her couch for the night. “One less
thing to worry about.”
Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways, NYT,
26.10.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/us/26runaway.html
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