| Show — Family Weekly 2 I nwgrii III dSU November 15 1970 What to Do Iff Youir Child He may be in a “runaway shelter” or an old friend’s home By BILL SURFACE The other evening a dis- traught couple from Hacken- NJ rushed into a police precinct station in New York City to report that their sack daughter had been missing for nearly 10 15-year-- old hours Blaming a "smart aleck girl for talking her into running away’v the father emphasized that his daughter was probably being preyed upon by dope addicts in New York’s grimy East Village section hippie-dominat- ed When the mother asked how long it would take the police to locate the daughter a detective looked piqued “Here we’re combing this neighborhood for a big dope dealer we’ve been after for months There's three of the meanest muggers you’ve ever seen And a rapist who carried a machete still loose That’s just for openers And you want us to drop everything and look for your kid first We don’t work that way “We’ve just got to find her tonight the mother cried as a sergeant routinely filled out a report on the missing gill’s description “What are we going to dor Never before have so many parents in the United States faced this type of crisis Small children have always run or wandered away from home only to be found after a harrowing search seldom farther away than the next block But now this problem has been compounded by the unprecedented who number of preteens and are fleeing from their homes With bicycles hitchhiking and marathon rock festivals now in style more than one and a half million children — about 65 percent of them girls— were missing from home long enough last year to be reported to local police as “runaways” Though police were able to find only a small percentage of the missing children they still arrested 149052 youngsters under 18 years old as runaways Of these 58885 were less than 15 years old and 4929 were under 10 Though countless other runaways have reached their 18th birthday and are le gally free of parental consent they similarly leave grieved parents wondering once they vanish if they are dead or alive What then does a parent do when this nightmare strikes? Recalling grisly headlines about the murder or rape of some runaways far too many parents assume the worst: their youngster has been lured into either communes such as the East Village or San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbur- y Chicago’s Old Town or one of the notorious types of “families” like that headed by Charles “Satan” Manson runawhose control over small-tow- n ways has been dramatized in the murder trial of actress Sharon Tate drug-infest- ed gardless of the state or town from which a child disappears the vast majority of 20000 alarms arriving at the New York Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit for example emphasize that a runaway “is believed to be heading for the East Village or Haight-Ashbur- phasizes one Midwestern policeman on child is the basis that “a usually well behaved as a runaway and the troublemaker at home is likely to get into trouble away from home” In seeking a teen-ag- e runaway parents should allow the teener’s behavior to be their guide in deciding if they can recover him unharmed or should they file a missing-persoreport have him arrested and possibly risk harmwell-behav- ed ns ful notoriety In one typical reaction concerned parents in upstate New York notified local and state police of their 16-year-- oid daughter’s disappearance —then went to the nearest newspaper and television station for help in locating her Newsmen described the father’s futile search for his daughter outside seedy “crash pads” in the East Village and raised the distinct possibility that the girl had either been sexually abused forced to live with “speed freaks” steal or sell drugs y” “That’s like guessing a child has run either north or south” maintains Captain Joseph Lynch head of the Missing Persons Unit “And it doesn’t help to locate the child” Some children do run to these hippie hangouts if they are within easy reach But by presuming that a child is a captive of them parents have caused runaways to suffer more from the stigma of their indiscretion than anything 'that occurred while they were away A parent should act em- well-meani- ng The girl later turned up unharmed at a relative's house in Massachusetts but the family couldn't dispel the publicity that she probably lived with drug addicts As a result she needed to change schools and undergo psychiatric counseling Parents have quietly recovered runaway teen-ageby focusing their searches in what seems to be the most practical place for them to hide According to police departments from California to Connecticut most runbeaches aways go to popular teen-ag- e rs break into their parents' summer or winter home loaf around college campuses or other schools museums parks busy downtown areas or the exciting music festivals If their parents have moved within the previous year or two runaways often return to their former neighborhood to stay with old friends Though they may be missing as long as 36 hours many children have persuaded an acquaintance (usually unknown to their patents) to let them stay at their house under the pretense that they have parental permission Once the general locality of a runaway can be established parents cannot assume that police often preoccupied with the rise in violent crimes can readily find him Whether relying upon a policeman or private detective both types of investigators often face the same frustrating limitation as a patrolman familiar 'with teen-ag-e hangouts in Chicago’s Old Town “Parents bring us pictures of runaways that were taken a couple years before or at a graduation” he said “But the runaway has grown got long hair or fancy glasses Sometimes kids even take all their pictures with them so the police can’t identify them Here the parent can spot their kid in a group halfway across a park But we can talk to a kid and not even recognize him as the runaway from Indiana —unless the parents are with us” Innumerable parents have promptly located runaway teen-ageby contacting either the pastor church-supportorganization or “runaway shelter” which can be found in almost every urban area or college town where runaways congregate Often called the “runaway minister” many such clergymen (and their staffs) maintain rapport with disillusioned runaways by refusing to tell either police or parents of their whereabouts after they ask for food or lodging But once a parent contacts them the clergymen frequently act as intermediaries to persuade the child to return home By conveying the parents’ concern rather than anger most clergymen also are able to reduce differences with the child so skillfully that the runaway upon seeing his parents runs to them instead of from them rs ed teen-age- rs Three young boys who ran away in Erie Pa were returned home by police |
