Work

Profile of runaway teens

What distinguishes one young runaway from another young runaway? The work of Marie Robert, a researcher in the Research Group on Social Aspects of Prevention at Université de Montréal, has thrown some light on the dynamic of adolescent runaways. There are two runaway profiles: the Fly to (those who leave for the novelty and adventure) and the Fly from (those who flee from home). “The street doesn’t represent the same thing for these two groups. For one, it’s adventure. For the other, it’s more of a refuge,” says Marie Robert, who published an article describing these two profiles in February in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect.

The more impulsive runaways in the first group—the Fly to—are mainly boys presenting behavioural disorders, such as minor delinquency and drug problems, who have a network of deviant peers. The second profile—the Fly from—includes young girls who are maltreated at home, but lack behavioural problems or a deviant network. In youth centres, however, they are all treated the same way. “As a result, there’s a problem of orientation, with the risk that staff lose sight of the maltreatment problem and act as if it did not exist, so the framework is inadequate,” the researcher stresses.

In a broad cohort study, Marie Robert paid special attention to the “Flight, itinerancy, and social-occupational insertion” aspect. Her data were collected from 130 teenage runaways, aged 12 to 17, at four youth centres in Québec (Côte-Nord, Eastern Townships , Montréal, Québec City ). Questions covered the 12 months preceding admission, the period during which the young people ran away from home. She tried to examine the entire personal, family, and social dimension—from poor relations with parents to school dropout—in order to identify factors that might possibly explain why the youngster ran away. The young people and their parents filled out several questionnaires designed to trace the major events that had taken place during the previous year. This enabled Marie Robert to identify the two characteristic profiles that apply to 82% of young runaways.

One of the factors she targeted was parental violence. As a general rule, parents declare fewer acts of aggression and tend to minimize their violence. “There’s a gap between teens’ testimonies and what their parents told us. The parental data show a lower rate than the rate declared by young people,” says Marie Robert. In spite of this, and unsurprisingly, when she compares runaways with non-runaways, she reports more violence declared by both parents and teens in homes with a teen runaway. Using the Conflict Tactics Scale (a measurement tool commonly used in psychology), the research group tried to assess the level of violence.