my 14 year old ran away

[Guest]

Please if anyone could help I am running out of options. She is 14 years old and caring two small backpacks. She is 4"11 hispanic last seen in Hayward California. Our residance is her name is Jasmin.

[ccsmod8]

Re: my 14 year old ran away

Hello,

Thank you for reaching out to us at the National Runaway Switchboard. It sounds like this was something your daughter had considered through planning. It must be even more daunting on you as to why she felt it necessary to leave home without notifying you. Having backpacks makes it seems as if she intended to stay somewhere and probably for a little while. Have you call the people she knows to see where she might be hiding? If she is staying with friends or relatives as a minor, it is considered unlawful to harbor her.

Have you talked to the police to explore these avenues to effectively alter the situation towards the positive if someone who shelters her without consent becomes aware of the consequences? The non-emergency number for the local police in Hayward is (510)293-7000. It must be frustrating to think he is somewhere close and cannot find her. Do you know places she is known to frequent? How are you coping so far? Do you have people you can turn to for support?

Have you thought about reporting her to the police? Filing the runaway report helps to track her locally and nationally in the event she gets picked up by the police. The report also helps to keep you safe from any possible charges of neglect. We do not report runaways but seek to explore other options to help you assess what needs to happen to stop this from happening in the future also. There are never any guarantees but the hope is to have her see other perspectives and ways to communicate better with you.

We are a 24 hour hotline that caters to family and youth in crisis. We are confidential and anonymous. We can be reached at 1800RUNAWAY. Unfortunately, we are not the sort of agency that goes looking for the runaway. We are central to Chicago but nationally in scope. We wish to hear from you if you need someone to speak to about the matter more closely. We have resources that seek to help you more along the lines of family reunification while others such as NCMEC set you up with a caseworker. They help to create posters and distribute these posters locally and nationally.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is a 24 hour hotline seeking to reunify families. The number is 1800-843-5678. They track the report you made with the local police on the National Crime Information Center webpage. The NCIC, NCMEC and NRS are all interconnected. We seek to explore options with you. Does your daughter have a cell phone or online sites? It might help to see whether her cell phone can get tracked by the police or whether you can reach her online. Another option might be to call the phone company to get a sense of people she called. Do you have call waiting or collect call capability?

We seek to reunify families through our message and conference call services. Our message service works where you call us to leave a message here for her and vice versa. It is helpful to spread word of mouth around so she gets to be familiar with us. It helps to open the door to communication if she were to call us hoping to call home with our conference call. We also have a Home Free program which is a bus ticket home if stranded. She needs to call us to initiate program and for us to assess whether she qualifies or not.

We are not simply here only for the youth. We understand this is a hard situation for you also and wish to support you by offering a listening ear. We are here for you and your daughter. We are not able to make reports but we have resources that are able to help out locally when she returns also. We wish you best of luck and hope you can continue to stay strong.

-NRS