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A teen living on the run

Sunday, January 26, 2003

By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Ever since she turned 12, Nija Britt has been on the run: first from her home in Philadelphia, and then from any number of group facilities. But somehow, Nija's mother, Arlene Falcon, always knew where to find her and get her off the streets.

	Nija Britt Her mother thinks she is roaming the streets of Pittsburgh Related article A tale of escape before she eventually disappears

Today, though, Falcon is frantic with worry because this time, she believes, her daughter, now 15, is roaming the streets of a strange city far from Philadelphia: Pittsburgh.

And no one except her family is actively searching for her.

The odds of finding Nija and keeping her off the streets aren't in Falcon's favor, child advocates and court officials say.

That's because there are two glaring problems: No one actively searches for such runaways, and even if they are found and put in group homes with a lot of supervision, there's no foolproof way to keep them there.

Under Pennsylvania regulations, runaways like Nija can't be locked up, although that might seem to be the obvious solution.

"I can't get anyone to help me. All I know is that she has been discharged from [a Pittsburgh group home] and an officer from Zone 2 came out and they reported her as a missing person. And that's it," Falcon said.

The distraught mother has done her best to look for the child long distance, writing letters to the media and frequently calling the North Side group home Nija disappeared from Nov. 19. She is also planning to take time off from her job to come to Pittsburgh herself to look.

Most of Pennsylvania's missing children are runaways. On any given day, most experts say, hundreds of children have run away from home.

On Jan. 1, 2001, a one-day survey by the Department of Public Welfare found that 630 teens were classified missing from the state's foster care placements or group homes, although most of that group later were accounted for.

Running away is not a crime, which means police may not arrest the child. More importantly, because the police have their hands full trying to solve crimes, they tend to consider runaway teenagers a lower priority.

If the child is a dependent under the care of the state, as Nija is, her caseworker is supposed to search for her when she runs. But because the caseworker also may be struggling with 30 cases or more, he or she usually doesn't have the time to get in a car and search for the teen.

Lock them up?

Most runaways eventually return home, either because they get tired of being on the streets and turn themselves in, or because a family member knows where to look, or, more rarely, because somebody recognizes the runaway and calls the police.

But there is a small group of teens who run away repeatedly and then, like Nija, are missing for indefinite periods.

It is these children, some experts feel, who should be locked up for their own safety.

In Pennsylvania and most other states, though, runaways may not be locked up. Nearly 30 years ago, Pennsylvania decided to end a long-standing practice of jailing children who were truants or runaways because they hadn't done anything wrong, or anything that would be considered a crime if they were an adult.

"Locking up girls like her was one of our nation's greatest scandals," said Robert Schwartz, of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, a national child advocacy group; he noted that from the 1940s to the 1960s, about half of all juveniles locked up were status offenders -- those whose acts of truancy, running away or defying parents were classified offenses only because of their status as minors.

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, which was enacted in 1974, was meant to eliminate that mass warehousing of teens "for the crime of being ungovernable," he said. "In effect, the feds made a deal with the states: We'll give you grant money for juvenile delinquency prevention efforts if you make sure you don't lock up dependent children."

"There's been a real national movement toward this," said Anne Marie Ambrose, deputy commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Human Services. "The concern is we don't want to go back to those days when kids were locked up because they were runaways," for fear of violating their right to freedom when they haven't committed a crime.

Pennsylvania was one of the first states to sign on, and hasn't wavered from that policy over the years, while some other states have regularly violated it and suffered financial penalties as a result. Two states, South Dakota and Wyoming, don't accept federal money at all.

But some experts feel this well-intentioned initiative has produced an equally untenable result: Runaway teens live on the streets, prostituting themselves for drugs or money. There is a small but growing feeling among some judges, court officials and others who work with these children that the current blanket prohibition against locking them up should be modified in a very small number of cases.

A judge speaks out

"I'm not suggesting we go back to the old days, but it would make our job easier if there were something other than what we have today," said Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Cheryl L. Allen, who oversees the juvenile section of the county court's Family Division. Allen says there should be a locked facility "for the most extreme cases."

"When a girl is a runaway, on drugs and pregnant, it might have to come to that. It's better and safer than the alternative," Allen said.

Sometimes, she said, "I have, in frustration, ordered girls put in shelters and one-on-one supervision and taken away their shoes" so they wouldn't run. "We've tried everything."

A 1980 federal law does create exceptions that allow states to lock up some chronic runaways and other troubled dependent children with a court order, but Pennsylvania hasn't adopted those provisions.

Still, child welfare officials have found a way around the state's prohibition: In some cases, the child will be sent to a locked facility in another state.

The Philadelphia human services agency sends about 190 dependent children each year to such facilities; last year, Allegheny County sent none. The practice is hugely expensive -- such placements cost between $300 and $700 a day, or up to $21,000 a month, paid for with federal, state and county funds. Usually a judge will order that DHS officials visit the child in 90 days, with a court hearing in five months. Family visits also are paid for.

Children are sent to these facilities, Ambrose said, only if it's a necessity because of mental health problems, and if in-state group homes or residential treatment facilities have rejected the children because of their history as runaways or other aggressive behavior.

That's what happened to Nija.

Ambrose would not comment on Nija's case, but Nija's mother said officials at Philadelphia DHS sent the girl, who was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, to the Brown School in San Marcos, Texas, one of a small group of generally well-regarded, privately run centers for troubled children across the country.

What would be better, said Frank Cervone, director of the Support Center for Child Advocates in Philadelphia, is intensively staffed, apartment-style housing for small groups of special needs children that are so well-monitored that locks aren't necessary. But such programs are very expensive, and there are too few of them in Pennsylvania to take all the children who need them.

Ready for freedom?

Nija Britt did well at the Brown School, her mother said, and after nine months, she was told she could handle more freedom. So she was sent back to Pennsylvania to an unlocked facility -- but to Pittsburgh, not Philadelphia. Like many runaways, she was placed in Pittsburgh precisely because it was strange to her, and might deter her from fleeing, which it didn't.

That kind of thinking is puzzling to Nija's mother, who wanted her child to stay in Texas. "I have to try to keep her safe until she's 18," Falcon said. "That's my responsibility as a parent."

But to child advocates, the policy makes sense.

"The Brown School is OK for nine months, but we can't lock kids up until they're 18 and hope that everything is better, regardless of what the mom wants," Ambrose said. "When she turns 18, all she's ever learned is what she's learned in an artificial environment, and the department doesn't want to be parenting kids until they're adults."

"Children vote with their feet, and when they run, they're telling you something. Their behavior is a symptom, and if you lock a kid up in a facility, you're only treating the symptom, not the cause," said Scott Hollander, executive director of KidsVoice, a private, nonprofit organization that provides legal representation for abused, neglected or abandoned children in Allegheny County.

But that kind of therapy failed to help Nija, her mother said, and now she is faced with the prospect of searching for her daughter in a strange city.

In the days after Nija's disappearance, according to her mother, Three Rivers Youth contacted police, filed a missing persons report, sent staffers out in cars and made phone calls to people who might know her whereabouts. But a week later, under the terms of its contract with the Philadelphia human services agency, it officially discharged Nija to make room for another girl.

All active searching ceased.

"It becomes an issue of resources," said Peggy Harris, chief executive officer of Three Rivers. While Harris declined, for confidentiality reasons, to discuss Nija's case, she said her staff did its best to find teens who flee, but that, "We're not trained to be in the investigations business."

When it comes to runaways, that is true almost everywhere. The Pittsburgh Police Missing Persons Unit has one person on staff during the day and one at night, Sgt. Amanda Aldredge said, and, "We get between four and 12 runaway reports a day."

Falcon has had Nija listed in the national Missing and Exploited Children registry, and when she went to court in Philadelphia in December for a hearing on her daughter's status, she successfully fought the judge's effort to officially discharge Nija from the child welfare system, which would have absolved the state of responsibility for her.

The case is being kept open until March, Falcon said. After that, she's on her own.

"At this point, there's no plan of action," Falcon said. She calls Three Rivers occasionally, "and they try to be nice. Some people I talked to there said they'd seen someone who looked like [ Nija], somewhere near Riverview Park.

"But it's all on me. Nobody else is doing anything."