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On the run: young and homeless
By Kathy Slobogin (CNN)
(CNN) -- Jessica Jacobs has been on the run since she was 15. She sleeps in an abandoned factory, sometimes goes three or four days without food, and huddles together with other street kids for warmth and safety. "It's not a life, for anybody," says Jessica, now 21 and living on the streets of Des Moines, Iowa. "You see things that are unbelievable. You see shootings, 15-year-olds doing drugs, popping pills. I mean it's bad." Numbers are hard to come by, but the last federal count found that there are between 1 million and 1.3 million youths living on the streets in the United States. One out of seven children will run away at some point in their lives. The National Runaway Switchboard, a hotline based in Chicago, Illinois, fields hundreds of calls a day from distraught parents and frightened runaways. Jessica Jacobs ran because she couldn't get along with her parents. "There are just tough situations at home and you don't want to be there," she says. "A lot of teenagers would rather live like this and risk their life and end up raped or killed than go home." Experts estimate at least half run because of some form of abuse. "After I was 8 years old and thrown down 13 flights of stairs, I didn't feel like going around anybody," says "Loko," another runaway in Des Moines. Now 22, he has spent most of his youth living on the streets, eating handouts, making what money he can pan-handling or stripping pipes or copper wiring from abandoned buildings. Life on the streets is dangerous. Experts and teens interviewed say rape, beatings, and prostitution come with the territory. "These kids are sitting ducks," says Les Whitbeck, a professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "They are pigeons for all kinds of predators." Whitbeck is running a survey of runaways that follows them over three years. Initial findings show that teens on the street have eight times the rate of mental disorders of teens in the general population. Thirty-three percent of those he has surveyed have attempted suicide. "These are really messed up kids," says Whitbeck.
What further complicates the picture is that young people living on the street can't go back to being children. They have seen and experienced too much. Whitbeck calls them "precocious adults." According to Whitbeck, many social service agencies make the mistake of having rigid rules like curfews, or insist that kids in shelters not use drugs or alcohol. But he says such rules simply force the kids back out on the streets. "You have to take their early adulthood into account," says Whitbeck. "Let them sleep in a shelter even if they're using. Critics say you're enabling them, but on the other hand you prevented that kid from being raped that night. You have to break a lot of rules to work with these kids." "Loko" and Jessica Jacobs are part of a "street family" in Des Moines. Experts says Midwestern cities and small towns are as likely to have a runaway problems as large population centers like New York. Des Moines outreach worker Howard Matalba tries to keep in touch with as many street kids as he can, wandering in nearby woods, railroad cars and abandoned factories to find their "camps." "They can freeze to death. I've seen them stabbed, I've seen them beaten with baseball bats, raped," says Matalba. "I have a very short time to get them off the street. If I don't get kids off the street relatively soon, I'll probably find them as a statistic." Matalba says cities such as Des Moines are desperately short of resources needed by street teens. There are 56 beds for homeless youth in the city; he says there are twice that many kids on the street. While many teens leave home because of family problems, runaways in Des Moines who are veterans of the streets often sounded a similar theme: No matter how bad it is at home, stick it out, because it's worse out here. Although these runaways may find a temporary family with other kids on the streets, those interviewed longed for the real thing. "A bed, somewhere I can call home," said "Loko." "Somewhere I can put my head and know I'm safe, actually secure."
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