Legalities

[Guest]

Help, please! I live in Georgia and I want to run away. So, let's say I run away to Alabama. Will the laws for runaways for Georgia carry over to Alabama because I came from Alabama? Or will the laws for Alabama aplly to me because I am in Alabama?

[ccsmod8]

Hello -

Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to reach out to us here at the National Runaway Safeline and posting on our public forum. By helping you during your crisis, hopefully there are other youth that are in similar situations can read this for help as well. Reading your post, we can see that you have very similar questions to a lot of our callers and you’re looking for some answers. Hopefully we can help.

As you have probably already read the multiple other threads that we have posted here on the forum board you should know that we are not legal experts. Generally what typically happens in each state is if you are below the legal age of majority, your parents would be able to make a runaway report and the police will be able to bring you back home. You have expressed that if you did run, you would go to another state. What most likely will happen is that if your parents filed you as a runaway, the report will be entered into the NCIC. That is a national database for missing people and runaways that law enforcement use. So if you did get into trouble with the police in a different state, they will still be able to tell that you are an active runaway. Then they will possible hold you until arrangements can be made to get you back home; in detention or local youth shelter.

If you give us a call on our 24/7 fully confidential hotline, at 1-800-RUNAWAY (786-2929) we could help answer some of those questions you have and could potentially help you brainstorm a solution to the issues you are having. We also have an online chat service available every night from 4:30-11:30PM CST that is available through our website (www.1800runaway.org) if you don’t feel like calling in to talk on the phone.