Every parent has an anxiety attack whenever they hear a report of a missing or abducted child in the news. They pray it never happens to them and rightly so because it is a parent’s worst nightmare.
Unfortunately, teenagers do not always get that same attention or elicit the same feelings as the missing or abducted child. Teens are almost automatically considered runaways rather than missing children.
And teens that are reported as runaways do not grab people’s attention. The police do not actively search for runaways. It is not a crime to run away from home.
However, in many cases when a teen is missing a crime has been committed. By the police not actively pursuing the conditions surrounding the teens disappearance, the crime goes undetected and unpunished.
If some adult lures your teenager and they run away from home and you did not know they were talked into leaving, then the police will not know it either. The police will assume your teen is a runaway and will add it to all the other runaways to be on the lookout for, but will not actively pursue the case because they do not know a crime has been committed.
We all have seen...