Running away from home is one of the commonest juvenile offenses in America today. Children run to escape, to hide, to start a new life, to change their routine, or to follow a dream. There are 1.3 million juveniles that live on the street each day according to the National Runaway Switchboard (NRS). The statistics regarding the rates of juveniles in this country that runaway are surprising. Unfortunately with all of the children out on the street our system is not doing much to combat the problem. In most states running away is not illegal, which leaves law enforcement with few options when attempting to locate or recover a missing runaway child. It has been said that, “young people are reacting to a society that has devalued human relations, that has subordinated them to acquisitiveness and competition and that has resulted in affluence and loneliness.” (Raphael & Wolf, 1974) It leads a person to wonder what could be so bad in a home or a society that a child feels that the street is his or her only option? There are obviously many different reasons that brings the child to making a decision to leave their house and choose this new life of uncertainty. Those reasons include, a bad family situation (VanHouten & Golebiewski, 1985), rejection from their parents (Adams, Gullotta, & Clancy, 1985), looking for excitement or something new (Blood & D'Angelo, 1974), the need to be independent from their family’s rules and regulations (Crespi & Sabatelli, 1993), or problems at school with peers (Post & McCoard, 1994). The children that make the choice to run are definitely not facing an easy decision. The families of runaways frequently have been described as being dysfunctional in one way or another: Parents are often separated, divorced, in trouble with the law, or abusing alcohol (Kurtz et al., 1991; Rotheram-Borus, 1991); runaways perceive themselves as unloved or unwanted by their families (Kurtz et al., 1991)...
