Runaways getting younger, reports Children’s Society

Children as young as eight are running away from home or care, while their disappearance goes unreported in two-thirds of cases, a report by the Children’s Society has revealed.

Make Runaways Safe found that more than 100,000 children run away from home or care every year, placing them in “grave danger” and at risk of physical abuse and sexual exploitation.

According to the report, the average age of young runaways involved in Children’s Society projects has dropped from 13 or 14 to between 11 and 12. The charity is also working with more boys than ever before.
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The report warns that mobile phones and social networking sites are making it easier for predators to groom vulnerable child runaways, while many are actively targeted by adults in public places such as parks and bus stations.

One in six young runaways ends up sleeping rough, one in eight resorts to begging or stealing to survive and one in 12 is hurt or harmed as a direct result of running away.

The charity claimed statutory agencies including social services, GPs and schools are unaware of the scale of the problem and too often fail to see young runaways as children in need.

The Children’s Society is now calling on government to launch a national runaways’ action plan to improve local authority and police responses to child runaways and offer early intervention support for children at risk of running away.

The Children’s Society’s chief executive Bob Reitemeier said government must take urgent action on the issue, since the cost to children and society is unacceptable.

“Every child who runs away should run to safety,” he said. “Society is failing young runaways, condemning tens of thousands of children to misery and danger by failing to provide an adequate safety net to break their fall.”

“These children remain hidden from view and out of the reach of all who work with children. Eight out of 10 don’t seek help from anybody because they don’t know where to turn, they don’t feel there is anyone they can trust or they fear the consequences. Tragically, there is an alarming lack of awareness and a noticeable failure to prioritise running away as a key child protection issue.”

Make Runaways Safe also attempts to calculate the cost of child runaways to the public purse. It estimates that it costs £82m a year to deal with all but the most severe incidences of children running away. It costs substantially more to deal with the most severe cases, where a young person gets involved in serious offending to survive or is taken into care.

The Children’s Society argued that cutting support for young runaways is a false economy, claiming that paying for early intervention could save up to £300,000 for each child who runs away.

Barnardo’s chief executive Anne Marie Carrie backed the Children’s Society call for a government action plan that sets out clear measures to respond to runaways and children at risk of sexual exploitation.

“At Barnardo’s we have been keen to highlight the risk of children who go missing also being sexually exploited,” she said. “A previous snapshot survey of our specialist sexual exploitation services revealed that more than half the vulnerable children and young people helped went missing on a regular basis.”