Child welfare professionals often emphasize the trauma children experience when they are removed from their families, without acknowledging that there’s a tipping point when the trauma of staying at home is greater. Sometimes they also say it’s pointless to place children in foster care because they just go home anyway as soon as they are old enough to leave.
But 1.6 million runaways each year are examples of children who don’t want to be at or return home. We have known hundreds of them personally, including many for whom prostitution was a lesser hell than the one they left.
We should listen to each child’s story and take it into consideration when planning their future, not make such crucial decisions based on a fashionable narrative that may not fit them.