Oh go on, please talk to us about runaway kids: Aviva will donate £2 to the charity Railway Children for every post!

When I was young, my parents took in a classmate of my brother who had run away from home. He had run into trouble with his father for doing drugs.
He stayed for a few weeks before returning home. Last I heard, he's now in prison. Still wish we could have done more for him.

DS is still little so luckily have no first hand experience. However I am really shocked by the scale of the problem. Never realised before how many young kids are out there.

I honestly wouldn't know what to do or how to help if I was faced with a situation where parents or a runaway kid needed help. Raising general awareness is a good place to start for all charitable or government organisations involved.

So this is it for the 2quid ;-)

One thing i would like to know is how is a run away identified?

As awful as it sounds how do you know they have runaway and not been taken, the ones missing for a long time i mean.

How on earth can such young children vanish and never be seen again, they must be supporting themselves somehow.

This issue needs highlighting more.

It's one of those things people just don't think about and never expect it to happen.

I had never heard of railway children or realised so many children run away.

MAybe if a helpline, safe houses etc were publicised then children would have somewhere to turn before getting to the point of running away.

An extra £2 to donate.

Thanks worldofmeh, it's complicated but he has his moments.

I think it is great that Aviva is helping such a worthwhile charity.

(on a separate note Aviva where very efficient when I cashed in an endowment last year.)

It's like a lot of things, Mary, it isn't something that people think about if it doesn't happen to them .

And then in the awful circumstances that it does happen, they have more to cope with than posting about it, or raising money for it, sadly.

I work for a charity which occasionally comes into contact with young people who have run away. Their stories are heartbreaking.

Come on MNers.

£2k is nothing to Aviva if we got this to 1,000 posts.

Or do you think this isn't worth posting about?

Hope this post is £2 worth

edam - I didn't mention that I'd seen the flyers some time ago for this particular charity. Albeit that the scale of tragedies in our world are set by the limits of our experience? I felt humbled in every sense of the world.

However, I did contact a U.K. 'runaway' charity to offer my services in any capacity I could apart from directly financial- and never heard back.

Your Dad sounds lovely. You should be proud of him.

My Dad helps to raise money for the Railway Children. He went to see them in India - the stories of what children go through there, and the tiny, tiny children living on the streets are just horrific. He was talking about children under five living in the station and looking after other children under five - unbelievable.

(That doesn't detract at all from the horrific things that happen in this country at all - it doesn't negate one form of tragedy to say another also exists.)

some very thought-provoking posts on this thread. I have heard of The Railway Children due to frequent rail travel in the past, I was always pleased to think that someone was looking out for children who are drifting. I have sat up/dozed through a couple of nights at railway stations and they were scary for an adult, never mind a child.

I had a very happy childhood but still did the putting an apple and a toy into a bag aged ?7 and walking maybe 10 feet down the street. I was furious about something I've forgotten entirely, but I remember my mum being extra warm when i came back.

DS hasn't run away thank goodness, but dh once went missing for five days. The idea that ds might do anything similar is terrifying - it was the worst time of my life.

x3

x2

I hope residential care for children has improved since the 80s - it seems to be more talked about, and that can only be good. For about a year I was in a unit for what I suppose they call EBDS nowadays - another girl ran away and I had so much respect for her, being too spineless myself.
Agree with the traveller accounts - I've met people while working at festivals that are thoughtful non conformists and part of a real community

quoteunquote that is interesting about the new age travellers, as that is my experience.

I walked out of home at 16, halfway through my A levels. I went to London to live with my dad but made the mistake of not asking him first and arrived to find he was out of the country. I slept rough for a few nights, then got picked up by a young man who had recently been housed after being on the streets himself. Luckily for me, he was a decent bloke - he fed me, talked some sense into me and then bought me a train ticket home the next day.

I went back but didn't go home, instead stayed with various friends for a few months and then packed a bag and went to live on a road protest site. From there I spent several years living on traveller sites and in squats, always finding friends and a bed. Its a tight community (despite being geographically spread out) and a pretty safe one IME, contrary to what people often believe (though as WoldOfMeh says it is not without its dodgy members). It is indeed full of runaways from all walks of life - ex-army and care leavers do make up a disproportionately large part of the community.

I'm housed now, safely and securely, and have two gorgeous children. But we are still very close to many people I met in those times and live in a community that grew out of the same scene.

Caladria - mainly because of the change to the law re: squatting. The more that the people on 'the fringes' are cracked down on, the fewer safe havens there are to go to. Pretty much as someone said upthread. Those were the people that looked out for me, though there was the odd wrong 'un too, I suppose..!

My niece threatened running away too, though- and somehow to be honest she, and her friends seemed so much more naive and less streetwise than we were that the thought of it horrified me. Maybe every generation feels that way about the next, though.

@Worldofmeh, why do you worry about current kids more?

£2

I remember planning my runaway scenario in my head when I was younger. It was always glamorous and led to me having an amazing adventure and being discovered as an actress or some such nonsense. But I remember several older kids/teenager TV shows ran runaway storylines which showed the darker side including violence, drugs, abuse... Also books. Pretty sure this scared me enough to never mean the fantasy became a real option. This kind of education is vital I reckon.

I agree with QOD. Bring back council run youth clubs with additional support.

This appears to be quite a slow moving thread and I personally believe that this reflects an issue that a lot of parents feel uncomfortable even thinking about. It's a bit of a taboo subject and this probably explains why it's come as such a shock to most of us that the number of runaways is so high.

Only got 5 minutes: been offline for a while, and only just seen this. It's good to see more is being done these days.

I ran away when I was 15 (though to be honest was living all over the place for a good year before). Like other people I suppose, no-one imagined it was anything else but me being 'difficult'. (Nice, articulate parents and all that.) To an extent, perhaps that is accurate- but the truth is, I don't know if I would still be alive if I hadn't. My father had mental health issues which used to make him try to commit suicide while taking the rest of the family along with him. Tidier.

I can't add much more, right now- but I was lucky to be able to have tapped into the traveller/squatting fraternity as well. Not without its dodgy paedo characters, but better than most of the alternatives. I worry about the current runaway kids more, now. :(