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If you’ve spent any amount of time online in the US true crime scene you’ve probably seen among other things the same account repeated over and over: teenage girl disappears without a trace; her concerned parents want to report her missing but local police refuses on grounds that she obviously just ran away and will probably contact them later. Potentially she’s just a junkie, a troublemaker delinquent or future prostitute; either way they think it’s not their job to search for her because reasons. They might also tell them to wait one/two/three days before filing a missing person claim because that’s the law or something. (True crime nerds will be happy to point out that no such law exists anywhere in fact.)
Later at some point someone finds her corpse or remains and it’s confirmed that she was brutally raped, tortured and slaughtered by some deranged serial killer or opportunistic toxic rapist dudebro. She is often identified only decades later thanks to DNA examination. (DNA research is a huge topic in the true crime subculture/fandom.) Said nerds, normally lipstick feminists and liberals, usually white suburban women, all agree that it’s a sad commentary on US police being lazy, misogynistic, uncaring assholes, especially in the South, of course.
Fair enough, I tell myself after hearing this; it’d be indeed difficult to show the police in a positive light in such cases. But I also notice what always goes unaddressed is the possibility that laziness and human evil alone do not fully explain the attitude of policemen. I mean – surely there were masses of teenagers who did indeed run away from home, weren’t there? And there was also a big surge in their number during the cultural and social upheaval of the ‘60s and ‘70s, right? We never hear about the great majority of them because their names never made it to true crime videos or documentaries, but the police was surely aware of them.
I once came across a description in a true crime book of social ills that led to a surge in crime in Weimar Germany. Millions of war veterans returned home, convinced that they fought for nothing and were humiliated, many of them with shattered bodies and/or shattered minds. Since these men were often violent and became alcoholics or drug addicts, if they had teenaged children, those often ran. The parallels with the US after the Vietnam War are kind of obvious, especially if we also consider the consequences of the upheavals I referred to above. In the Weimar era there were also many cases of divorced women throwing their children out to the street because daddy could no longer pay child support, and children running away from families that lost everything due to hyperinflation and later the Great Depression; many of them ended up as underaged prostitutes.)
So anyway, I find it a bit odd that the prejudices of law enforcement officers, who have to deal with the scum of society everyday, are dismissed automatically as evidently baseless. And this phenomenon does seem to be Blue Tribe coded.
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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