City-based hotline helps runaways
The caller sounds nervous.
She's phoning from Mobile, Ala., about her 14-year-old grandson. The boy didn't come home.
She believes he ran away.
National Runaway Switchboard volunteer Alma Molino, 28, gives advice, referrals. The grateful caller calms down.
Molino moves on to another caller, a runaway.
About 100,000 such calls flow each year into the agency, based on Chicago's North Side.
Established in 1974 by Congress as a national communication system for runaway and homeless youth, the group's 24-hour hotline helps kids get home, or find services.
Among services it offers are conference calls between runaways and parents, a message relay service for youths to send word home, and a partnership with Greyhound, which since 1995 has given free bus tickets home to 10,000 runaways.
"Every child that goes missing -- whether they've been kidnapped or run away from home -- is a parent's worst nightmare," said its director, Maureen Blaha. "I think people [understand] 'kidnapped.' But . . . there's a whole other population that are the majority of missing children."
She believes the numbers speak to a "silent crisis."
A Sun-Times analysis found that more than half of the switchboard calls since 2000 came from area codes in Chicago, where the group has heavy name recognition. The peak was 73 percent in 2005.
At NRS, about 150 volunteers go through 40 hours of training to learn how to link runaways with more than 16,000 agencies in its database that offer shelter, counseling, substance-abuse treatment and child protective services.
"There's just a really huge need out there, both for services and understanding for runaway youth and their families," said Molino, a graduate student. "Some calls can be emotional."
The majority of kids who call the center, about two-thirds, are 15 to 17, and more than a third cite family conflict or abuse at home as reasons for running -- consistent with national trends.
Also, three out of four callers are teen girls.
"A lot of times, people think, 'Runaways? These are the bad kids.' But they're not bad kids. These are kids running from bad situations," Blaha said.
