Why Children Run Away From Residential Facilities?

News recently broke in Colorado that the state is losing track of children in foster care who have run away from residential treatment centers. Colorado’s Department of Human Services claims it has no obligation to find children who have run away—even though those children are in the Department’s custody—and instead, it typically closes cases of missing children.

Making matters worse, Colorado appears to take little interest in getting to the root of why children are running away. Indeed, Colorado’s DHS has actively tried to withhold aggregate data from the public regarding the number of calls coming from residential centers to the child abuse and neglect hotline, including calls about children running from facilities. Ultimately, news outlets sued the state, forcing it to release the data.

Children running away from residential facilities is not a new phenomenon. High runaway rates are usually indicative of problems within both child welfare systems and specific facilities. After all, children often run to escape harm. This is especially heartbreaking considering these children came into child welfare systems because they were being abused and neglected at home. Now they are again victimized in foster care.

In December 2017, the New York Times published an article with the unfortunate title, “How Do  You Care for Sex-Trafficking Victims if You Can’t Hold On to Them?” (Foster care is not a prison system—children in care do not deserve to be locked away.) The article explained that on nearly a daily basis teens were running from Hawthorne, a residential facility north of New York City that housed sex trafficking victims. Many of those runaways experienced ongoing exploitation. The article noted that some teens were recruited by peers inside the facility, others ran until they felt safe, and still others went AWOL to see if anyone cared.

Four years later, Normative Services Institute (“NSI”), a Sequel facility across the country in Wyoming closed its doors. Sequel had come under increased scrutiny after reports of rampant abuse and improper use of restraints within its facilities in the U.S. At NSI, there were recurring incidents of children escaping the facility, and the local sheriff’s office reported that it was regularly called to NSI for runaways and fights. Residents in the local community threatened to shoot kids discovered running away. It got so bad that some California decided to remove all children placed at NSI (it was reported than in 2019, one-fourth of the children at NSI were from California).

And while NSI claimed the closure was unrelated to allegations of abuse, children inside the facility experienced violence at the hands of staff for years. For instance, it was reported that an NSI employee dragged a child down stairs by his feet, another put his hands around a child’s neck and threatened to kill a child, and yet another was charged with felony child abuse for choking, punching, and kicking a young person.

Back on the East Coast, in the first half of 2023, 184 teens ran away from another residential facility, the JCAA Westchester Campus located at Pleasantville, New York. In response, the JCCA simply changed it intake procedures. But did anyone take a deeper look at why so many children were trying to escape this campus? Did anyone look at what was happening inside the facility?