Young person 'lived in a cave for three weeks' after running away from care

The Running Away report by Roger Morgan documents the views of almost 100 children living in care. It explores the reasons why children run away and gives an insight into what children actually do when they go missing.

The report found that some children ran away for “fun” or to get back to “a happy place” associated with good memories, but others went missing because of relationship breakdowns with their carers and the desire to move to a new placement.

“One young person told us they had lived in cave for three weeks after running away,” the report said. ?

“Another told us they had spent £2 on a train ticket and once through the barriers had just boarded lots of different trains to get a long way away. They had been found on a beach the next day by members of the public.

“One said that her foster carers had promised to take her with them on holiday, but in the end they went without her, so she ran away.”

Morgan said that the children he spoke to identified many risks associated with running away, including the danger of being raped, sexually exploited, stabbed, kidnapped, murdered, getting involved in drugs or becoming pregnant. But some said the desire to get away from their situation outweighed those risks.

Morgan urged professionals to do more to talk with and listen to children, to sort out their problems before they get to the stage where they feel the need to run away.

“For some children running away was the only solution to escape something they couldn’t cope with,” he said.

“The best way to prevent children and young people from running away from a placement where they couldn’t cope with problems was for staff to ask and listen to their problems and try to solve them.

“Even if this meant a change of placement, it was better to talk through problems before the child felt the need to run away. If they had run away, it was vital that the child could discuss any problems after coming back - with a person they trusted and when they felt ready to do so.”

Children's minister Edward Timpson said government continues to be concerned that some local authorities and care homes are letting children down “by failing to act as a proper parent”.

"This is a very important report – which makes clear that carers and social workers need to listen and address children’s concerns as early as possible, before it reaches the crisis point of them feeling they have no option but to run away,” he said.

“We have launched a major overhaul of the residential care system to protect children – in particular to address issues around local agencies not having a grip on how many are going missing from care nor for proper alarms to be raised and action taken when teenagers run away multiple times. Today’s report will feed into this work.”