From: lindae@netcom.com
Subject: ThrowAway Children  (A Child Quest Informational Post)
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 23:05:20 GMT


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		     to the protection and recovery of missing, abused,
		     and exploited children.

The U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency    
Prevention, published a report in 1990 entitled Missing, Abucted, 
Runaway, and Thrownaway Children in America.  It contains information on
National Incidence Studies and lists Numbers and Characteristics.  It
focuses on identifying risk factors, on the children's experiences, and
on the responses of parents and police. 

This particular posting will focus on the Thrownaway Children who were
talked about in this study.  Data was collected from six separate
sources including: (1) a "Household Survey which was conducted by telephone
surveys of 34,822 randomly selected households, which yielded interviews
with 10,544 caretakers about the experiences of 20,505 children; (2) a
Juvenile Facilities Survey; (3) a Returned Runaway Study; (4) a Police
Records Study conducted in 83 law enforcement agencies in a national
random sample of 21 counties to find out how many Non-Family Abductions
were reported; (5) FBI Data Reanalysis which looked at 12 years of FBI homicide
data; (6) a Community Professionals Study of 735 agencies having contact
with children in a national random sample of 29 counties.


THROWNAWAYS:
      
The following numbers are based on 2 ways of defining a Thrownaway.  The first
is "Broad Scope" which defines the problem the way the affected families
might define it.  In contrast, "Policy Focal" generally defines the problem
from the point of view of the police and other social agencies.         

"A child qualified as a Broad Scope Thrownaway if any one of four situations
occurred:  1) the child had been directly told to leave the household;
2) the child had been away from home, and a caretaker refused to
allow the child back; 3) the child had run away but the caretake made no
effort to recover the child or did not care whether or not the child returned;
or 4) the child had been abandoned or deserted.  In any case, the child had
to be out of the household for at least 1 night.  The estimates for Thrownaways
came from two sources:  the Household Survey, and the Community Professionals
Study, which was used to estimate the number of children who had been
abandoned.

There were an estimated 127,100 Broad Scope Thrownaways in 1988, including
112,600 from the Household Survey and 14,500 who were abandoned based
on the Community Professionals Study.

A "Policy Focal" case was a Thrownaway who was without a secure and familiar
place to stay during some portion of the episode.  All the abandoned
children were considered Policy Focal.

There were an estimated 59,200 Policy Focal Thrownaways in 1988."

"Broad Scope Thrownaways from households tended to occur in the spring.59% were preceded by an argument and {27 percent by violence.  Most Thrownaways went
to the homes of friends and relatives.  Most also stayed within a 10-mile
radius of their home.  In 60% of the cases, caretakers claimed to know the 
Thrownaway's whereabouts most of the time; but since many of these
caretakers were not actually looking for the children, they may have expressed a false degree of confidence."

One of the major conclusions from this study was:

All policy, publication, and research on the problem of Runaways should
take into account the difference between Runaways and Thrownaways.  
Thrownaways are a large group with different dynamics; they suffer from
being lumped together indiscriminately with Runaways.