Calls and contacts to National Runaway Safeline spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, as young people look for help and guidance in dealing with stress and strains of the ongoing crisis.
To the surprise of experts who help runaway youths, the pandemic didn’t appear to produce a big rise or fall in the numbers of children and teens who had left home. Still, the crisis hit hard. As schools closed and households sheltered in place, youths reached out to the National Runaway Safeline to report heightened family conflicts and worsening mental health.
“Those ones stand out,” says a crisis center supervisor who asked to go by Michael, which is not his real name, to protect the privacy of his clients. During the pandemic, the center didn’t spot major changes in its missing child numbers, “which honestly was shocking,” Bischoff says. “We figured we were either going to see an extreme rise or a decrease.”Many youths were fleeing out of frustration withrestrictions, Bischoff says, as well as frustration with the unknown and their own lack of control over many situations.
Some children have felt confined in unsafe homes or have endured violence, as one 15-year-old reported in the forum: “I am the scapegoat out of four kids. Unfortunately, my mom has always been a toxic person. … I’m the only kid she still hits really hard. She’s leftBesides family dynamics, mental health emerged as a top concern that youths reported in 2020. “This is something notable. It increased by 30% just in one year,” Stern says.
“So I’m going to make their dreams come true,” he wrote. “I’m going to go live in California with my friend who is a young YouTuber. I need help getting money to either fly or get a bus ticket, even though I’m all right with trying to ride a bike or fixing my dirt bike and getting the wagon to pull my stuff. But I’m looking for apartments in Los Angeles so I’m not living on the streets and I’m looking for a job. Please help me. My friend can’t send me money because I don’t have a bank account.