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Crime was skyrocketing in the 1970s and 1980s and the vast majority of teenage runaways who went missing did so of their own accord and were not victims of serious crime. The interstate highway system, cheap oil and cars, buses and an economy where an unskilled worker (including a woman one) could support themselves and find employment in most places made it easier than in previous generations (I suspect ‘running far away from home’ and building a life as a teenager in 1870 was actually quite expensive and very difficult if one had no money or connections, even a lot of menial domestic work required references and people to vouch for you).
It makes sense, in that context, that the police focused on crimes that were definitely committed and victims they could identify and in most cases (that weren’t homicide) speak to.
Well, if we want to be fair, the word 'serious' is doing the heavy lifting here, depending on the level of seriousness involved, because I'm sure many of the teenage runaways, especially girls, were sexually assaulted, molested, trafficked, recruited to become drug smugglers or prostitutes etc., crimes which were generally never reported. I guess maybe the great majority of them turned into average employees in the service sector, but I'm not sure about that.
Also, wasn't the period after 1973 one of stagflation and high unemployment? Surely it wasn't as bad as today for unskilled manual workers, but still.
Er... you thought room and board were free? The actors were making rational tradeoffs here; that's kind of why they were never reported.
(Just like the groupies, for that matter, but in a slightly different way.)
Assuming female hypoagency here (and conflating teenagers with children, which you do further below) is a mistake; I believe the meme was "I was young and needed the money". That is the labor they offer to get things that they want. Marriage is kind of the same way, just longer-term.
Complaining about this is just an isolated demand for rigor around sex, which in an environment of equality is incorrect.
OP claimed ‘the vast majority of teenage runaways who went missing did so of their own accord and were not victims of serious crime’. In the sense that the vast majority of them probably never fell victim to murder and were thus never mentioned in various true crime stories about serial killers, that is correct. I pointed out though that probably a large number of them were victimized in other ways, ways that are technically crimes even if many of the teenage victims made up their minds from the moment they ran away to turn into drug mules and prostitutes (which is possible but doesn’t seem likely), crimes that are usually considered serious in the mainstream.
I’d say the main reason was that teenage runaways were aware that trying to report a rape or assault to the police was likely to be a futile effort on their part.
I believe this meme usually refers to young women – that is, young adults – who did porn or posed for titty mags while in college, usually with no outside pressure being involved, so the situation is slightly different.
Again, those are normally adults. I know it’s sort of a fad among third-wave feminists to bring up the horrible reality of so-called baby groupies, but this is still a fact.
No, I mentioned (teenaged) children in the context of children of traumatized war veterans running away.
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Date rape and statutory were not seen as serious crimes in the seventies.
What did you think was in the back of the van, ice-cream and candy?
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