Young Runaways
The final item of business is Kenneth Gibson's motion S1M-2528, on young runaways. Would the older runaways who are leaving run away as quickly as possible to allow the debate to start?
Motion debated,
That the Parliament welcomes the report Missing Out – Young Runaways in Scotland; commends the University of York, Aberlour Child Care Trust, Extern, Children's Promise and The Children's Society for producing this report, the most extensive piece of research yet undertaken into young people under 16 who run away or are forced to leave home; notes that this is the first comprehensive research to provide both an overall picture of the scale and extent of the problem while suggesting workable strategies for responding to the needs of this very vulnerable group of young people, and asks the Executive to look closely at the findings and recommendations of the report and act accordingly.
I am pleased to have secured this debate today on a subject that has, regrettably, not previously been given the consideration it deserves.
First, I pay tribute to Jim Wade of the University of York, the Aberlour Child Care Trust, Extern, Children's Promise and the Children's Society for producing the excellent "Missing Out—Young Runaways in Scotland" report, which was the catalyst for the motion. I would also like to thank Martin Henry, who is the child protection co-ordinator of the Edinburgh and the Lothians child protection office, for his advice, and the 36 MSPs, from every party in the Parliament and none, for signing the motion and making the debate possible.
Runaways can be defined as children and young people under 16 who run away from home or care. One in nine children run away or are forced to leave home before the age of 16 due to difficulties in their lives. The authors of "Missing Out—Young Runaways in Scotland" estimate that 6,000 to 7,000 children under 16 run away in Scotland every year, that 9,000 run away in total and that the total number of incidents is between 11,000 and 12,000. Of those who run away, around 1,000 do so because they are forced to leave home. Three quarters of the young people who run away do so once or twice, but a quarter run away three times or more. Disturbingly, half of habitual runaways first ran away before the age of 11.
There is little difference in the rates of running away for young people living in cities, towns or rural areas, and there is only modest variation according to income. However, running away is more likely to occur among young people living in lone-parent or step-parent families than among those living with both birth parents. Young people who have experience of living in care are almost five times as likely to run away as those who have not, and they do so more often—although half of children in care who ran away first did so when living at home. For those in care, running away is strongly correlated to an unstable placement. For those who have had 10 or more moves, the incidence of running away is four times higher than for those in a stable care environment. Females are more likely to run away, but males are more likely to run away for longer.
Although problems at home—such as emotional and physical abuse, neglect and rejection—influence almost 80 per cent of runaways, there is also a strong correlation between running away and truanting or other difficulties at school such as bullying, isolation, exclusion or hating school. Personal problems with the police, alcohol, drugs, boyfriends or girlfriends, feeling fed up, lonely or depressed, or having low self-esteem may also trigger running away, perhaps because of parental reaction to the young person's behaviour.
The risks of running away are high. Almost one in six young people who run away overnight report that they have been physically or sexually assaulted while away from home. More than a quarter report that they have slept rough. One in seven resorted to risky survival strategies such as stealing, begging and survival sex. Although running away may provide temporary relief from pressure, a large number of young people found themselves lonely, hungry and frightened. I will quote some of the things they say.
"I didn't take anything with me, not even a coat…. I didn't have much money and couldn't afford to buy any food, so I couldn't even sit in a cafe to keep warm."
"I had no choice. If I stay at home I get smacked around. If I run away I might get beaten or robbed but at least I might not. At home I know I will."
"I had no money, was upset constantly, in bad health and became a thief and a prostitute."
"Nowhere to sleep, no food, have to beg and shoplift, always cold. You get into a lot of trouble if not careful."
"I didn't know help existed. Advertising is needed to let people know what is available."
Once a pattern of running away becomes set, effective interventions are harder to achieve and the life chances of those young people become modest at best.
What services are currently in place? Unfortunately, there is no clear national policy on how local agencies should respond to the problems of young runaways. Most go home or are returned by police or social services, but little help is available in sorting out the underlying problems they ran from.
Understandably, the police tend to focus on missing children whose lives might be in danger, while social services concentrate on runaways who enter care or are child protection cases.
Excellent work is being done in a number of areas, not least by child protection workers. However, the absence of a national framework has several drawbacks. Local authorities do not have to establish specific services in relation to runaways or develop joint protocols between agencies.
Runaways who run across council boundaries or move care homes since previous incidents might slip through the net. National helplines might find it hard to refer runaways to local services because appropriate services for young runaways do not always exist. To exacerbate the problem, the recent closure of three of the four safe houses for young runaways in the United Kingdom—that leaves only the London centre—has left young people with few options.
In research and consultation, young runaways have themselves made clear the chronic lack of information available before and after running away. They feel that services do not listen or involve them in decisions that affect their lives.
What is required to address effectively the issue of young runaways? It is vital to have national leadership from the Scottish Executive to create a policy and service framework that will establish agreed joint local protocols between police, local authorities and the voluntary sector. I am aware that the Executive discussed creating a national strategy on 4 October at a meeting with child protection committees. Such a strategy would link the issues of young runaways and child prostitution, and establish a national working party that reflects the experiences of those working in the field and draws on expertise from north and south of the border. That is to be welcomed, but I am concerned that no further progress has been made in the 17 weeks that have elapsed since that meeting, although the briefing document for the debate hinted at a recent meeting of Executive departments to discuss the issue.
I therefore ask the minister to progress the matter with great urgency. The national policy framework should include a range of preventive services for children, young people and families to address the underlying problems that cause children to run away; services that provide early intervention for those who run away for the first time; services to meet the needs of young people with a repeat pattern of running away; a database, established in co-operation with our UK and European partners, that can track runaway children across Scotland and beyond; and greater resources for hard-pressed children and families units. Preventive measures should include the incorporation of the issue into personal and social education programmes in schools; discussions in settings where young people gather such as youth centres or residential units; and peer counselling.
It is necessary to train professionals who work with young people to improve their ability to recognise the signs that prompt running away and link youths to appropriate services. The evidence about the immediate and long-term risks of running away points to a need for focused preventive services such as family mediation and family group conferencing.
There is a need for accessible information about the services that are available locally and for strategies to publicise them, such as user-friendly publicity in schools, health and leisure facilities, on the internet and in the media.
The lack of structured activities that are available to young people reinforces the pattern of spending time on the streets and getting into trouble. Providing young people with a greater range of educational and leisure activities can reduce the incidence of running away and of youth offending.
Independent interviews are needed to assess young people's reasons for running away, to identify risks to which they might be exposed and to agree an appropriate response. Those interviews must be backed by resources to provide further support. Young people should be returned home only after there is an agreed plan of action.
To avoid the risks on the streets, young people need access to a safe place to stay when a direct return home might place them at risk. The Children (Scotland) Act 1995 provides for local authorities to offer refuge directly or through an independent agency when young people are at risk of harm, but the powers enshrined in that act remain underutilised and no refuge provision exists in Scotland. The type of shelter that is envisaged would be safe, secure, homely and small in scale. It would offer young people space to gather their thoughts, obtain advice and counselling and plan their next steps.
Research identified outreach work as a primary approach for meeting the needs of the most vulnerable and hard-to-reach young people on the streets. There is a lack of infrastructure and guidance to support best practice. Most existing projects are based in urban areas; the provision should be extended to small towns and rural areas.
Projects that model good practice have shown the way forward. For example, the ASTRA—alternative solutions to running away—project in Gloucester has cut the incidence of repeat running away by 61 per cent and has saved the police 75 working days on missing persons cases.
Running away is a symptom of great distress. If left unchecked, it makes young people highly vulnerable to social exclusion in adulthood. I ask the minister to act on the issue with all speed.
I preface my speech by congratulating Kenny Gibson and thanking him for bringing the debate to the chamber.
The "Missing Out—Young Runaways in Scotland" report surprised and saddened me. It is generally recognised that there is a dearth of comprehensive information on runaways, but the report is welcome—if that is the appropriate word—in that it throws some light on the subject. I was shocked by the statistics that show that one in five young people run away before the age of 11, that girls are more likely to run away than boys and that each year there are between 11,000 and 12,000 running away incidents in Scotland.
That is not to say that I did not realise that youngsters run away. When I was a teenager, one of my school friends—to protect her privacy, let us call her Peggy—ran away from home without her parents' permission. She ran to my home and I recall my mother wondering why Peggy had appeared with a small bag full of clothes—she had not been invited to stay. I was young and excited at the thought of Peggy making a big bid for freedom, so I asked my mother for some money. She asked why Peggy would need it and I told her that Peggy was running away. My mother, like all wise mothers would, told me to go and make coffee and then take the dog out for a walk so that she and Peggy could talk. By the time that I came back, Peggy's notion of running away had subsided. She stayed for tea and then my Mum phoned her parents—with Peggy's knowledge—and told them what had happened. The difficulties that seemed impossible to Peggy a couple of hours earlier were discussed and resolved.
How easy it would have been for Peggy to become a statistic. What was necessary was some commonsense discussion and the help of an intermediary with an objective point of view—sometimes that is what children need. I know that it might seem that one is taking on the skills of a trained peace negotiator, but it is so much better than the conflict and heart searching that we needlessly put one another through.
Although not all the children who run away stay away from home for more than one night, about one in six people reported being either physically or sexually assaulted while they were away from home. More than 43 per cent of those young people who had run away reported that their recent absence had involved rough sleeping, staying with a stranger, the use of risky sexual survival strategies or assault. Those are things that would make any parent's blood run cold. Those risks highlight how dangerous any kind of absence from the home environment can be for youngsters, no matter how short the time.
One comment particularly struck me. The young person said:
"I left in the evening, I didn't know what to do. I stayed in a park on a bench, I just sat up all night scared, seeing drunks and drug addicts all around me. It was a situation I didn't want to repeat but I did."
The creators of the report have made several recommendations that the Executive is asked to note and act on. Some of the recommendations are perhaps less workable than others. For example, in some areas there seems to be a lack of parental involvement in seeking to address a permanent solution to the problem of youngsters leaving home. Surely home would be the best place for those problems to be addressed,
I am not suggesting that those who are running away from home because they are being physically or sexually abused should be sent back—far from it. I am well aware that the most common reason for a youngster to run away is because of arguments and conflicts. Arguments with parents or step-parents can be persistent and often underpin the decision to run away. However, solutions should be preventive rather than curative. Informing young people about the services that exist to help them to run away could encourage them to go. One of the report's findings states:
"Negative feelings increased amongst those who had run away more often."
Those negative feelings probably increased because not enough action had been taken in the home—action that might have resolved the problems that caused the youngster to run away in the first place.
The most recent action taken by the Scottish Executive in approaching the problem of young runaways was a cross-departmental meeting. "Missing Out—Young Runaways in Scotland" is welcome because it provides information that was not previously available. I would like more discussion and further probing of the issue. One of my concerns about children who run away is the worry that parents go through—Peggy's parents would have been devastated by her absence. I am concerned that not enough is being done to notify parents that their child is in a place of safety, which leaves them broken-hearted and wondering what might be.
What is required is a strategy that seeks to address the problems of children who run away. We need to resolve those problems as early as possible to end the intolerable situation of children running away from home.
I intend to be brief. I welcome the debate, which focuses again on the experience of young people and on some of the dreadful things that they have to face. I congratulate Kenny Gibson on securing the debate.
Kenny made the important point that young people are prompted to run away by a range of triggers. We should see running away as one means of coping with difficult problems and troubles, some of which may be in the home and others in the community. In trying to find a solution, we need to focus on the triggers. We also need to support young people who have taken the step of running away from home.
It is essential to listen to young people in a sensitive way. We need to understand that, in some circumstances, they leave because what is at home is worse than what they might face if they go. That in itself is a frightening thought. However, young people leave home for other reasons and sensitivity needs to be employed in understanding those reasons. We must not categorise everybody who runs away as having one problem that can be solved in one way.
Sometimes, when young people play truant from school, they are characterised as having mental health problems although their response is entirely rational to their experience. I worked with a young person who might have been defined as having mental health problems as she did not come to school very often. In fact, she was afraid of what would happen to her mother when she was out of the home. That is often the case with runaway young children. Given their circumstances, what they are doing is entirely rational. As a society, we have the responsibility to address the factors that drive young people away at the same time as we focus on the child and his or her problems.
Many members will know of Quarriers Homes in my constituency. At a meeting last week, I was given an interesting piece of information during a discussion about its homeless projects and children who run away. I was told that nearly all the children with whom they deal have a live contact with at least one member of their family. I was told that, even when children are living on the streets, they keep up that contact. That supports what Johann Lamont said.
We should examine services that in turn examine the cause and the family, rather than the other way round. I was surprised to hear that a significant number of runaway children who are homeless have contact with their families, sometimes two or three times a week.
The point that I tried to make was that both should be done. Assumptions should not be made about what happens inside the family—the problem may be in the community or school.
The report emphasises the scale of the problems that are faced by young people. If we are not shocked by the fact that young people are forced to run away from home because of their experiences, then—quite frankly—nothing will shock us. Kenny Gibson described young people's lives when they run away and their experiences should terrify us and spur us to greater action.
There is understandable anxiety about young people being taken into care inappropriately to become looked-after children. However, sometimes, that is exactly what a young person needs. That fact should spur us on to ensure that, when young people are brought into care, we guarantee safe places for them to be looked after. I understand the dilemma of social workers who do not want to make such decisions, but I know of youngsters who did everything but demand to go into a safe place. The solution is not always rehabilitation with the family. We have to address the causes.
I welcome developments in schools, where there is a greater understanding of the need to focus on the child rather than on the individual symptoms that are displayed by a troubled child. That will ensure that the child is supported through social work, educational psychologists and the family working together, which will prevent young people taking extreme actions.
As I said, I welcome the debate and trust that the Executive appreciates the seriousness with which it is presented. I also trust that the Executive's response will be commensurate with the problem.
Like others in the chamber, I am pleased that, as a result of the findings of "Missing Out—Young Runaways in Scotland" and of the debate, some attention is being given to a disturbing situation—it gives serious cause for concern.
No one here can be comfortable with facts that confirm that a large number of children and young people in Scotland are so unhappy with their situation that running away is the only option that they consider to be open to them. The survey findings suggest that, every year in Scotland, between 6,000 and 7,000 children under 16 run away for the first time—from a total of 9,000. Another disturbing statistic to emerge is that 52 per cent of those children run away before the age of 11. Those statistics are shocking.
Johann Lamont mentioned looked-after children. More than 40 per cent of young people in substitute care or who had been in such care were found to have run away—compared with 9 per cent of those who had never been in care. I accept that the report does not mention any direct correlation between running away and being in care. Indeed, any such suggestion would be simplistic, given that there are always many, varied and complex reasons for children running away.
Nonetheless, the fact that a high percentage of runaways have been in care cannot be denied. We can link that with the evidence of some of those who took part in the research. They felt that they could not always access support at times of stress or crisis and that there was no one in authority whom they felt could help them with problems such as bullying, abuse, addiction or loneliness. That evidence underlines the growing problem of the shortage of child care workers. The minister would be surprised if I did not take this opportunity to raise that matter again.
In a survey that I was involved in recently, 78 per cent of the local authorities that replied said that the difficulty of recruiting social workers was a serious concern. The average vacancy level among established children's services social work posts at the time of the survey was 11.5 per cent. There is no doubt that there have been substantial increases in the number of referrals to—and statutory obligations on—child care social work services, usually without the resources necessary to meet need. The survey highlighted that, in some areas, almost 30 per cent of referrals remain unallocated. Areas of child poverty and deprivation are the worst affected and have the highest levels of staff vacancies and unallocated cases.
Unallocated cases means children: children who are often in desperate need of protection, advice and support but find themselves with nowhere to turn because of the crisis in the social work profession. The crisis is acute and the chasm between statutory obligations to children, including looked-after children, and the actual services that it is possible for overstretched front-line staff to deliver is widening. Media reports confirm the extent of the problem almost daily. Just this week, Aberdeen City Council launched a plan to recruit desperately needed child care workers. Only one of the city's children's homes is fully staffed and the council admits that it is missing targets.
We—and particularly the Scottish Executive—need to take urgent action on the issue to ensure that all children get a fair chance in life, with help, when they need it, to avoid some of them taking the drastic step of running away and exposing themselves to significant risk. I urge the minister and her colleague to take that on board and seriously to consider all the recommendations in the report.
"Missing Out" is an important report and this is an important debate. The galleries are sometimes full of pressure groups in members' business debates, but there are no pressure groups here today. The children we are discussing will not have support unless we recognise their situation and give them support. It is good to have the big minister here; the tradition has been for a deputy minister to attend members' business debates.
When we discussed adoption regulations yesterday, I pointed out that every adoption case has its own story. The same applies to young runaways. Individuals' stories might be of problems, stresses and feelings of isolation. As Lyndsay McIntosh said, incidents can simply involve youngsters staying away with friends for a night or two. As the report makes clear, such an escape valve can sometimes give stressed youngsters a sense of relief and allow them to face the future with a better perspective on their situation, but a substantial number of youngsters stay away for longer, in dangerous and exposed circumstances. Some become serial runaways.
The report highlights some important trends, to which we must pay particular attention. First, almost 80 per cent of runaways run away from problems at home. Secondly, a substantial number of runaways cited problems at school as contributing to their unhappiness. That may not be the major reason, but unhappiness at school is often in the background. Thirdly, children from the care system were four or five times as likely to run away as others.
Kenny Gibson outlined the problems. I will not repeat all the statistics. When we consider how to tackle the problems, we must look at the care environment and the school environment and stand ready, as far as possible, to offer youngsters assistance in coping with problematic family environments.
The first thing we must do is improve the care environment in a way that better meets the emotional needs of the young people who are potential runaways. Irene McGugan drew attention to one way in which that could be done—having better staffing standards in care environments. We have spent time discussing the Regulation of Care (Scotland) Bill and other legislation and have held debates on the needs of looked-after children; I am happy that we are trying to improve the situation so as to reduce the number of potential runaways.
In schools and in other places, we must offer youngsters opportunities to talk and to have counselling within the guidance system, the social and personal development curriculum and through the social work system. If a child runs away, that should be noted as an important event and genuine attempts should be made, through interviews, to recognise the reasons for the incident in a way that respects the youngster's position and seeks to offer mediation, whether there are problems at school, in the family or elsewhere.
As often happens in such debates, we have recognised this evening that the kind of joint working that we have advocated in community schools is also valuable in respect of young runaways. Although geographical considerations might present difficulties, consideration must be given, as Kenny Gibson said, to the provision of some kind of refuge for youngsters who might otherwise expose themselves to danger by sleeping rough or succumb to offers of assistance and companionship from unsavoury sources.
At the Liberal Democrat conference in Pitlochry last spring, we noted the findings of "Missing Out—Young Runaways in Scotland". We broadly endorsed the full recommendations of that report, although some of them are more difficult than others to implement.
I am grateful to Kenny Gibson for raising this issue. I urge the minister to look positively on the recommendations in the report and to recognise that although there may be financial implications, taking proper action can save substantial heartache for vulnerable and potentially endangered youngsters.
I congratulate Kenny Gibson, as other members have done, on securing this evening's debate. I would like to pick up where Johann Lamont and Irene McGugan left off.
It is quite clear that many social work departments in Scotland are stuck in negative loops: the more people they lose, the greater stress there is on those who remain and the lower the morale in that department. That problem has been brought to the Executive's attention several times in the past couple of years and Irene McGugan's mention of it to the minister again this evening was pertinent.
I spent more than a decade of my teaching career as a guidance teacher. I always liked to focus in on the child and on what could be done. I strongly believe that there are people whom we can use. There are a lot of voluntary and professional mediation services. Far from being underused, they are used to their very limits, but they could certainly do with extra funding so that they can train and recruit more people. The service that they provide is extremely valuable and offers the best way forward in many cases. Guidance teachers generally do the best that they can for children. They are trained in counselling and can bring parents in to talk, but it is the professionals who can do the work best.
School is definitely the place to start. There are few mediation services to rely on and social work departments are short of staff, but the one place where people who are qualified and experienced can be found is in schools.
Perhaps the Executive could think about a trawl around Scotland's primary and secondary schools to find out the standard practice. Obtaining a flavour of that practice would not require consideration of many schools and the results could be built upon. The Executive could ask, "What would be the best standard practice to follow?"
There were runaways at the school at which I was a guidance teacher, but we did not have a specific response for dealing with them. We dealt with them on a case-by-case basis. A detailed standard response for schools would be useful so that mediation services, for example, could be brought in as early as possible. Ideally, the issue should be raised in guidance lessons. Drugs and relationships are discussed, but it is not standard practice in guidance classes to discuss running away from home—perhaps because people do not want to encourage it. The issue could be flagged up and notices asking children who had thought of running way to talk to their guidance teacher first could be put up around schools.
Those are my few positive ideas and I hope that the Executive will consider them. The Executive could act on them in the next few weeks.
It would be helpful if members kept their speeches to three minutes—to keep the debate on time.
I thank Kenny Gibson for securing the debate. It appears that all members are singing from the same hymn sheet. I hope to continue that trend.
According to "Missing Out—Young Runaways in Scotland", one in nine Scottish children will run away or be forced to leave home at least once before they are 16. They are in incredible danger, as there is a lack of services to deal with the problem.
Contrary to common opinion, young people do not run away because they are attracted by the bright lights of the big cities or because they are looking for excitement. It should be remembered that young people run away because problems have become too hard for them to handle and they are looking for breathing space. The report shows that four out of five young people who run away leave as a result of problems at home.
Running away might seem to be the best option at the time, but it can create more problems than it solves. The report shows that one in six of those who ran away was either physically or sexually assaulted. Combined with the recent Barnardos report, which highlights the problem of child abuse through the sex trade, it indicates to the Parliament that services must be provided to protect young people from sexual predators.
Simple changes could be made to protect young people. For instance, if someone runs away, they should not be left to return to the same situation and have to deal with the problems that made them run away in the first place. Being unsupported and on their own is not an option. Procedures should be in place throughout Scotland to ensure that young people who run away are interviewed by someone who is not involved with their care, to find out why they ran away and to help them deal with the problems that caused them to run away.
Education programmes and materials should be available in schools to provide young people with details of services that are available to them and the dangers of running away. We must also ensure that schools and other youth settings can help young people to deal with problems at home. Sometimes, we forget that schools are not simply about reading and writing—schools are where most young people spend their lives. They must be equipped to deal with the problem.
There must be services for those who run away, to ensure that they do not end up living rough on the streets and becoming prey for sexual predators. That means providing refuge accommodation for under-16s.
The Executive must take on board the conclusions from "Missing Out—Young Runaways in Scotland", "No Son of Mine!" and "Whose Daughter Next?" and ensure that our young people can access the help they need exactly when they need it.
Bravo—three minutes on the button.
The benefits system is a reserved matter, so I will not go on about it at any length. However, the removal of benefits from 16 and 17-year-olds is relevant to many problems, such as youth homelessness, that face not only runaways, but young people in general.
I want to pick up a couple of the points that were made in a Liberal Democrat conference resolution last spring. Letting people know locally what is available is important. Every school, youth club and place that young people go to should have a wee poster that says where they can get neutral advice. The poster could say that young people should speak to their guidance teacher or a social worker. However, many young—and older—people regard teachers and social workers as part of "them": the enemy to whom they are hostile.
As well as building up schemes in schools in the way that Ian Jenkins, Robin Harper and others described, we should consider the possibility of supplying within schools people who are outwith the system. I know that some schools have active chaplains. They could build up relationships with young people, who could go to the chaplains, confident that they were not part of the system that was oppressing them.
There are also good leaders of youth clubs, and good teachers particularly, whose position might make children feel that they could go to them.
Does Donald Gorrie agree that it would be a good idea for family mediation services to be encouraged to come into schools on a regular basis?
Yes. That is a constructive suggestion, which would help children.
I also suggest that one could have the equivalent of citizens advice bureaux in schools, which would be a sort of outreach service. I am hostile to the word "counsellor", perhaps because I was a councillor for a long time and people confused the two words. We could develop the idea of having people who could give advice, whom the children would have confidence in and relate to. Different schools could go about that in different ways, and youth clubs and so on could be involved.
We want to tell the children about the advice that is available, and we want to make the advice available in a neutral and accessible fashion. Many people hate the whole system and need to be persuaded that it is not hostile to them. Having a friendly, neutral adviser would be helpful.
I am happy to be able to respond to the debate as someone who regularly contributed to such debates from the back benches. I know that they are an opportunity to have an in-depth look at issues that we all feel strongly about.
I congratulate Kenny Gibson on introducing the debate and everyone involved in it. We are not only looking at the issues contained in the report "Missing Out—Young Runaways in Scotland", but putting forward constructive suggestions on how to make progress. That is not just in relation to young runaways; I am interested in some of the proposals that have been put forward in relation to the wider roles of different professionals and others coming into schools, who work with young people generally.
I do not think that anybody could fail to be moved—and Lyndsay McIntosh made this point—by the findings of the research published in the report. Gil Paterson correctly identified the fact that one in nine children in Scotland run away from home every year: that has to be a matter of concern for us all. For some, that might be a part of growing up and of trying to test the boundaries or to test where they might go before they leave home. I suspect that the majority of those who run away are running away from the sort of things that Johann Lamont and others identified—circumstances that they cannot stand any longer.
Gil Paterson recognised that the research dispels any myths about running away to the bright lights or to streets paved with gold. The reality is that children and young people most often run away in desperation because of abuse, family conflict, bullying or other situations that they simply cannot cope with and about which they do not know where to get advice. They do not know which way to turn or who can help. That is not to say that that advice is not out there. A number of helpful projects and organisations exist. We are, for example, supporting the development of advocacy services such as those that members have talked about, through the children's services development fund. We have also promoted initiatives such as children's rights officers and the work undertaken by Who Cares? Scotland and other young people's organisations.
One of the most concerning facts to emerge from the research, which Irene McGugan mentioned, is the fact that children who are looked after in the care system are much more likely to run away than are those who live at home. I am sure that that has been borne out in her experience, as it has been in mine. Young people themselves identify some of the solutions that members have talked about. They say that if someone is in care and runs away because they are unhappy, they are always taken back and nobody stops to think about whether something in that setting was a problem. We must take that seriously.
Members also mentioned the need to involve the police and others in training, to enable them to understand what young people are going through when they run away. One of the suggestions that young people make is that an independent person—somebody outside the immediate system—should be brought in, to whom they can talk and who, if there are problems, can give them the help that they need.
More needs to be done to prevent children from running away. The kinds of initiatives that members have talked about would be helpful. However, we also need to think about the practical support that children should get when they go on the run. Kenny Gibson and other members mentioned the difficulties for young people on the streets. Robin Harper gave a helpful insight—in his usual style of trying to be constructive—into ways in which the range of people who are around already can be involved in the process. Ian Jenkins and Donald Gorrie also suggested that if we can harness the efforts and enthusiasm of the people who are already working with young people and who are concerned about them, we can take things forward.
The "Missing Out" report makes a number of helpful recommendations. We have started to consider what we can do at a national level. I stress that we are taking that work seriously and that it is already beginning. Although it took 17 weeks to get to this debate, that does not mean that nothing has happened in that time. A working group of officials from across the Executive has met and will involve in its work those who deliver the services for young people who run away. We are also keeping closely in touch with a similar project in England, which is being run by the social exclusion unit in the Cabinet Office. That unit contains representatives from a wide range of Government departments. The recommendations from that group are now emerging, and we will consider which are appropriate to implement here.
We have to be aware that there is no simple solution or quick fix to the problem. We have identified the fact that the underlying causes of running away are many and deep rooted, and a range of our initiatives are aimed at tackling some of those underlying causes. It is one of our key priorities to give children the best possible start in life and to equip them and their families with the skills to deal with problems before crisis points are reached. Several useful suggestions were made tonight on the role that families can play. Lyndsay McIntosh compared assisting with teenage children to acting like a peace negotiator. Through initiatives such as sure start Scotland, we want to involve parents from early on in understanding the stages that their children are likely to go through and the way in which they should deal with them and support them, while we recognise that parents themselves often need support.
Several members mentioned what we must be able to do in schools. Through the resources that have been committed to the new community schools, we are trying to focus on integrated family support, family learning and health improvement. That is a starting point for us. We already have a system that we can build on, and initiatives are in place to improve self-esteem, motivation and behaviour among pupils who are disaffected or disengaged from the process or who are verging on exclusion. People recognise the difficulties of pupils' being out of school and out of the system and how easy it is for them to fall through the net. That is why we are keen to use the funding to keep those difficult young people with the right support in that setting and not let them fall through the net. The new opportunities fund has begun to help in that regard.
I recognise the work that Aberlour Child Care Trust has done on the issue. I have known about the work of the organisation for a number of years. It has set up a pilot project in Glasgow that is working with young people to help them find solutions to the circumstances that have caused them to run away. The Scottish Executive is providing funding to support that over three years, and we will keep in touch with its progress.
The issue of refuges was mentioned. I am aware of the provision in the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 that relates to the possibility of refuges being set up. I will be interested to see from reports of further research that is being done in that area what is effective in terms of refuge provision. Refuge might not mean simply having a building; it might be about having people who are able to get young people tapped into the right resources. I hope that, when we consider the issue, we will focus not only on the setting up of buildings, but on all the other areas that need to be addressed.
Our work on developing a national strategy for young runaways comes at a time when we are focusing generally on better services for children and better integration of services for children. Since the action team report "For Scotland's Children" was launched last year, several of its suggestions have been acted on, and the Cabinet sub-committee on children's services will ensure that the momentum for change is not lost overall.
We have had a useful and constructive debate, which will feed into that process. I confirm that I support the motion and that the Scottish Executive is committed to acting on those issues, to help prevent children and young people from running away and to improve the services for those who do.
Meeting closed at 17:52.