Band on the run

Des Moines

Every night, a van cruises the city streets, searching parks and abandoned buildings for runaways and homeless youths. Volunteers implore the adoles­cents they find to seek shelter. Failing that, they offer “survival packets” and free tele­phone calls. This is not Rio de Janeiro or Calcutta. It is Des Moines, Iowa.

Some 7, 000 young people ran away from home in Iowa last year. (For the inci­dent to be counted, a missing-person re­port must be filed with the police.) Most of those fleeing adolescents returned home within 24 hours; many did not. Around 200 young people are living on the streets of Des Moines at any one time, reckons George Belitsos, the executive director of Youth and Shelter Services, a non-profit group. His organisation has offered shelter to 453 young people over the past 12 months. Half are runaways and half are homeless. What is the difference? “They become homeless because nobody’s look­ing for them any more, ” says Mr. Belitsos.

Of course, Iowa is no different from the rest of the country. The National Network for Youth reports that 2.8m youths had what it euphemistically calls “a runaway experience” during the previous year. It is hard to say how many of these runaways spent long spells on the street. Les Whit-beck, a University of Nebraska sociologist, reckons that counting the adolescent homeless is like trying to count flies in a room with the door and windows open. Many runaways don’t want to be found, and, Mr.Whitbeck says, they look little different from other children.

Looks deceive, however. Mr.Whitbeck is part of a team from the University of Nebraska that recently produced the Midwest Longitudinal Study of Homeless Adolescents (mlsha), based on interviews with 455 runaway adolescents in eight mid-western cities. The research, which began in 2000, with follow-up interviews every three months, paints a portrait of deeply troubled young people who leave home because they have been abused, only to find life on the streets often worse.

Roughly half of the boys and a third of the girls in the study suffer from “conduct disorder”, a mental illness associated with emotional problems, compared with 10% among all teenagers. Some 16% were thrown out of home; more left because they were sexually or physically abused. Nearly three-quarters of all runaways say they have been struck with some hard object; a quarter of the girls have been asked to do something sexual. Some 23% of the males and 43% of females show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Life on the street is rotten, too. A third of the subjects surveyed in the mlsha have been beaten up; nearly half have been threatened with a weapon. Runaways are far more likely to engage in risky teenage behaviour: drugs, alcohol, unprotected sex. Nearly half of the girls interviewed had been pregnant at least once. With no means of support, homeless youths are also more likely to steal, deal in drugs or trade sex for a place to stay. Half the teen­agers in the study have thought of killing themselves in the past 12 months.

Why do more American boys and girls appear to be fleeing from home? Economic problems often play a role, despite the gen­erally healthy state of the American economy until relatively recently. One in three of the young people turning up at Iowa shelters report that one of their parents is unemployed. A more fundamental problem is the shaky state of the American family. The rise in the number of single-parent families over the past quarter of a century has meant that more kids fall through the cracks of divorce. And weaker family ties mean that fewer troubled teenagers find refuge with a kindly grandparent or uncle.

When it is possible (and safe), the runaway groups try to reunite children with their families. But a large number of run-aways show no sign of wanting to go back: the average adolescent who turns up at an Iowa shelter has run away more than six times. The only way to deal with such chronic runaways is to treat them as “too early adults”, argues Mr.Whitbeck. That means offering them shelter and drop-in facilities and teaching them about jobs and living alone. “They simply won’t go back to being children again, ” he says.

Of course, it would be preferable to raise healthier children in the first place. That not-so-simple task would begin with parents learning to behave better. If that doesn’t happen, the wish-list includes earlier intervention by schools, more money for counselling, better drug treatment – indeed, anything that will bring responsible, caring adults into the lives of troubled young people. Without such help, the iron law of so many social problems will prevail. Deeply troubled families all too often produce deeply troubled children.

(From The Economist (July 6^th – 12^th 2002)

XXV. Give the gist of the article. Does such a problem exist in your country/ city? Are there any ways out? Give English equivalents to the words you can't do without:

шпионить; обмен (обмениваться), банда, заявление (утверж­дение), арестовать членов банды, потрясенный до глубины души, развращенный, приставать (заигрывать), совращать, ки­бер­пространство, фотоснимок (кадр), наблюдательная органи­зация, найти решение (проверить зацепку), сосредоточиться (выйти на…), поразить (смутить), приговорить, раздельно проживающий (супруг), вставлять кляп (затыкать рот), пред­стать перед судом, на воспитание.