ANN ARBOR—People today are likely to pay more attention to child abductions than runaways, leaving outdated and ill-serving public programs to address that persistent issue, a University of Michigan professor says.

“Public panic is more likely stirred by reports of abducted youth or prostituting youth than runaway behavior,” said Karen Staller, an assistant professor in the U-M School of Social Work. “The problem has not disappeared, but the framing of it has shifted in reaction to its initial conceptualization. “

Many of today’s policies and practices to protect runaway youth date back more than 40 years.

The National Network for Youth, an advocacy group, estimates that 1.6 million to 2.3 million youths run away from home every year. Staller’s research starts in the early 1960s as the wave of baby boomers turned 13. By 1967, the first of these boomers reached 21.

“There were many youths leaving home and transitioning from childhood to adulthood,” Staller said. “Not surprisingly, conversations about leaving home as a matter of life course and leaving home prematurely” as in running away” began to twine in public discourses including policy arenas and in mainstream press. “

Since the early 1960s, there has been a dramatic shift in the construction of the social problem of runaway youths” from one in which little boys’ adventures were celebrated (as experienced by Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn) to one that was concerned with the dangers that happened to runaway girls.

Running away was characterized as a private family matter in the early 1960s, Staller said. Children were deemed incapable of maintaining a viable survival plan, returning home when they became tired or hungry or were intercepted by police officers or other adults. It became a national agenda in the late 1960s and was known as a public problem.

It was during this time that communities inundated with runaway youths developed innovative” and sometimes controversial” programs to serve them, Staller said. These alternative providers began operating facilities” such as Covenant House in New York City, Huckleberry House in San Francisco and Ozone House in ANN ARBOR—to address the needs of wandering youngsters, but did so initially without the support of law enforcement, child welfare authorities, family court judges and others normally responsible for unsupervised youth.

These agencies served as a bridge between traditional authorities, where service interventions tended to be imposed upon youth by adults, and counterculture crash pads and services where youth accessed resources themselves, she said.

Growing concern for youths’ constitutionally protected civil rights, coupled with the judicial system’s growing discomfort with policing the moral and civic education of youths, led to increasing numbers of troubled children appearing on the streets, Staller said. It also prompted the enactment of federal runaway youth legislation, including the Runaway Youth Act of 1974, which endorsed the alternative-service community’s model.

Amendments to the Runaway Youth Act have led to the voluntary sector being asked to serve as an ” alternative” for increasingly troubled youths at the same time excusing more traditional public service providers from responsibility, such as schools, mental health facilities and child protective services, she said.

Staller looks at the construction of this social problem and the responses that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in her new book, ” Runaways: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped Today’s Practices and Policies. “

Staller faculty profile