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WhipTheHip -> RE: The good times never last (9/18/2010 6:33:44 PM)
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If society really cared, they would offer runaways the ability to live in a half-way house, where their urine was monitored for drugs, where they wouldn't need to hook up with a pimp, where they could get vocational training, where surrogate parents actually showed them love, where they could get therapy, and encouragement. Also, society ought to let them work a legitimate job.
Instead, they can't work a legitimate job because they are too young, and they society really does not offer them a decent place to live. Many runaways are just not capable of going to school after having lived on the streets half their life. Thee is an unrealistic expectation that society can keep all these runaways celibate, when many of them have been highly sexually active for God only knows how long.
As a manager of a low rent hotel on Miami Beach, I saw dozens of runaways come and go. They were always escaping from juvenile detention, and from local institutions for runaways. They escaped not because they would not have been happy with a safe place to stay. Instead, juvenile detention centers and local institutions for runaways were filled with physical, emotional and sexual abuse, were impersonal, were highly restrictive, and offered them nothing but living a barren, highly impoverished existence. They had no access to computers. No access to cell phones. They were treated like children. Their environment was highly restrictive and repressive.
Finally, most runaways feared living in places the state would place them, where they would be in constant danger, where they were routinely physically, emotionally and sexually abused by other juveniles and by staff. I think you are expecting to much of derelicts living in trailer parks.
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