Running in the Shadows - Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways

[SOS]

New York Times, October 26, 2009

MEDFORD, Ore. — Dressed in soaked green pajamas, Betty Snyder, 14, huddled under a cold drizzle at the city park as several older boys decided what to do with her.

Betty said she had run away from home a week earlier after a violent argument with her mother. Shivering and sullen-faced, she vowed that she was not going to sleep by herself again behind the hedges downtown, where older homeless men and methamphetamine addicts might find her.

The boys were also runaways. But unlike them, Betty said, she had been reported missing to the police. That meant that if the boys let her stay overnight in their hidden tent encampment by the freeway, they risked being arrested for harboring a fugitive.

“We keep running into this,” said one of the boys, Clinton Anchors, 18. Over the past year, he said, he and five other teenagers living together on the streets had taken under their wings no fewer than 20 children — some as young as 12 — and taught them how to avoid predators and the police, survive the cold and find food.

“We always first try to send them home,” said Clinton, who himself ran away from home at 12. “But a lot of times they won’t go, because things are really bad there. We basically become their new family.”

Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13. Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens."



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/us/26runaway.html

Trickle down economics in action. Wall Street profits boom while American children sleep by the side of a highway.

[Nikki Stone1]

1. We're becoming Brazil

And yes, it's "trickle down" economics.

[SOS]

2. Economist Simon Johnson

has often said that the US economic structure now more resembles Thailand than a Western industrialized nation.

[Nikki Stone1]

3. You have a link for him?

And yes, I agree.

[SOS]

5. Yes

Check out his blog at
http://baselinescenario.com/

[Nikki Stone1]

6. Thank you!

:)

[rubberducky]

4. This article just rips this old grandma`s heart out, the comments following are something you MUST

read.

[Festivito]

7. Seems like a reason Republicans would like economy drops.

All these dispossessed underage vulnerable kids hidden behind the scenes.

The big ones just have fun with the pages in nearer openness. Eh, Mark Foley?