Long-Term Effects of Running Away – Report Fact Sheet

Key Findings

• Health Impacts – For adults who ran away from home as adolescents:
  • The likelihood of having suicidal thoughts increases by 51 percent. An even stronger relationship is found between suicide attempts and previous runaway experience, with runaways being more than three times as likely as non-runaways to attempt suicide.
  • They are 44 percent more likely to have health issues that prevent them from doing moderate activities than someone who never ran away from home.
  • The likelihood of them being a smoker as an adult is 2.4 times as high as non-runaways.
  • They are 67 percent more likely to use marijuana as an adult than non-runaways.
  • They are 53 percent more likely to report having a sexually transmitted disease as an adult than non-runaways.
• Economic Impacts – For adults who ran away from home as adolescents:
  • Their annual personal income level is $8,823 lower on average compared to non-runaways.
  • The likelihood of being a recipient of AFDC, public assistance, or welfare is 76 percent higher than adults who never ran away from home.
  • They have lower education levels on average than adults who never ran away from home. Their odds of not having a high school degree or GED at wave four of the study are 50 percent higher than adults who never ran away from home. The average former runaway has completed a vocational or technical degree while the average non-runaway has completed some college.
• Law Enforcement Impacts – For adults who ran away from home as adolescents:
  • They are approximately two and a half times more likely to be arrested as non-runaways.
  • They are 99 percent more likely to sell drugs than adults who never ran away from home.

• 10 percent of girls ran away from home before they turned 18 while only 7 percent of boys ran away.
• Hispanic respondents are more likely to run away from home (10.8 percent) compared to non-Hispanic respondents (8.2 percent). African American respondents are less likely to run away at 7.5 percent compared to 8.2 percent of non-African Americans.
• Only 6.2 percent of individuals who were born outside of the United States ran away from home before turning 18, which is significantly less than the 9.6 percent of respondents who were born in the United States.
• In terms of sexual orientation, individuals who described themselves as 100 percent heterosexual had the lowest runaway rate at 7.6 percent. The highest runaway rate was reported by bisexuals at 21.7 percent, almost three times higher than the rate for heterosexuals.
• More than 30 percent of respondents who had been in foster care as an adolescent had also run away from home compared to 8.1 percent of individuals who have no foster care history.
• Verbal abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse before the age of 18 are all correlated with higher runaway rates.
  • Individuals who were verbally abused are more than twice as likely to run away from home (11.7 percent) compared to those who were not verbally abused (5.3 percent).
  • The likelihood of running away from home is three times higher for respondents who were physically abused as youth (17.4 percent) than those who were not physically abused (6.3 percent).
  • Children who were sexually abused are more than twice as likely to have run away from home (17 percent) as those who were not sexually abused (7.9 percent).