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(04/08/08 4:52am)
CHICAGO – The young caller’s voice is high-pitched and trembling.\nHer mother’s been drinking, she says. They got into a fistfight, so the girl grabbed her backpack and a cell phone and bolted, with little thought about where a 13-year-old could go on a cold night.\nHiding in an alley off her rural hometown’s deserted main street, she calls the only phone number she can think of: 1-800-RUNAWAY.\n“I just don’t feel like I’m taken care of like a daughter should be,” the girl tells the volunteer who answers the phone at the National Runaway Switchboard. She stutters between sobs and shivers.\nHer story is a common one at the Chicago-based hot line, which handles well over 100,000 calls each year, many from troubled young people who are dealing with increasingly difficult issues.\nNational Runaway Switchboard data shows the overall number of young callers facing crises that jeopardized their safety rose from 13,650 in 2000 to 15,857 last year. About two-thirds of the latter figure were young people who were thinking of running away, had already done so or had been thrown out of the house.\nFederally funded since the 1970s, the National Runaway Switchboard is regarded by people who work with troubled youth as an organization that provides one of the best overviews of the shadowy world of teenage runaways, which is difficult to track.\nThe group’s statistics showed that callers are getting younger and that 6,884 crisis callers last year said they had been abused or neglected, compared with 3,860 in 2000. That is a 78 percent increase.\nSome callers just want someone to talk to, about problems at home or with friends. Others who have already run away use the hot line to exchange messages with their families – to let them know they’re OK, or to arrange a free bus ticket home.\nSome are desperate for a place to stay, for safety, for options.\n“I’m scared of my parents, and I don’t want to go back there. Please don’t make me!” pleaded the 13-year-old girl who called this particular night.\nThe information she gave the hot line checked out. However, her name and other identifying details could not be included for this story because the National Runaway Switchboard guarantees callers confidentiality.\nIt also quickly became apparent to volunteer Megan McCormick – who has been trained to spot the occasional crank call – that this girl’s fear was real.\n“I know it must be really scary,” said McCormick, a graduate student in social work at the University of Chicago. As they spoke, she checked the call center’s extensive computer database for shelters in the girl’s hometown.\nThe closest was in a larger city, 40 minutes away. But when McCormick called, she was told they didn’t take anyone younger than 14.\nSuch scenarios are common in many regions of the country, particularly rural areas where resources for runaways are scarce. Further complicating the matter, the Runaway Switchboard has found that more crisis callers than ever are 14 and younger – 1,255 in that age group in 2000, compared with 1,844 last year.\n“The reality is, there are not always services available for kids who are calling,” says Maureen Blaha, executive director of the National Runaway Switchboard, which began as a Chicago area crisis hot line in 1971 and went national three years later. “We try to be as creative as we can be to find solutions. But there isn’t always a simple answer.”\nOthers in the youth services field concur.\nThey note that while the number of shelters and other organizations that help runaways have slowly increased over the decades, they have been unable to keep pace with the demand. Many institutions also lack the resources to deal with the severity of issues young people face today.\n“The population is much more disturbed than the runaways who were being seen 20 or 30 years ago,” said Victoria Wagner, chief executive of the National Network for Youth, a coalition of agencies that serve troubled young people. “There are more mental health issues, more substance abuse, more coming from violent home situations.”\nLong-standing government support for the Runaway Switchboard has been a vital component in addressing the problem, Wagner said. But, she adds, federal dollars for shelters and other services, also through the Runaway Youth Act, have remained largely stagnant since it first passed in the 1970s. So she and others are pressing Congress \nfor more.\nIt’s a tough sell in trying economic times. But the irony, Wagner said, is that when people are unemployed and families are struggling, young people are even more likely to have reason to run.\nThe 13-year-old girl who has called the Runaway Switchboard sounds even more anguished when McCormick tells there are no shelters in her area that will take her.\n“So there’s nowhere I can go?” she said in disbelief.\nSeveral times McCormick asks about other options, but the girl says she has none.\nShe says her friends’ parents would only take her back home. Relatives, whom she rarely sees, live out of state. And she seems even more afraid of her father than her mom, claiming that her parents divorced because he was abusive.\nEven so, she has little doubt that one or both of her parents will soon be out looking for her.\nMany communities that want to establish Safe Places are turned down because they have few or no services to offer runaways.\nNine states have no Safe Places at all. That includes the home of the 13-year-old girl who was on the line with the Runaway Switchboard for more than an hour.\nSeveral times, she adamantly refused to call the local sheriff or to get child protective services involved.\n“All this stuff that’s going on, it’s just really overwhelming,” she told McCormick, the call center volunteer. “I don’t want my mom to go to jail. I can’t do that to my family.”\nEventually, though, she changed her mind. She asked McCormick to stay on the line while she spoke with a county social worker and then the sheriff.\n“I’ve kind of run away from home,” the girl told the sheriff’s dispatch operator. “I need somewhere to stay.”\nMcCormick waited on the line until a sheriff’s deputy found her and picked her up. Finally, the girl was safe and members of the Runaway Switchboard staff looked relieved.\n“You get used to some aspects of this,” says Cori Ballew, a Runaway Switchboard supervisor who oversaw the call. “But you never get used to some of it, especially when it ends with no resolution.”\nSome runaways, like this one, find help of some kind, she says.\nOthers, faced with few choices, hang up.
(01/08/07 1:56am)
For 17-year-old Amanda Sanchez, social networking is an obsession, a distraction -- and when she moved to a new town last summer, it was her lifeline.\n"Over the summer, MySpace was my best friend," says the high-school junior, who lives in San Dimas, Calif. "I didn't know anybody after I moved, so I was on there all the time."\nShe usually checks her page a couple times a day -- and keeps in touch with old friends and those she's made at her new high school. So preferred is this form of communication among people her age that guys ask her for her MySpace address more often than her phone number.\nIt's pretty typical behavior, according to a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The survey of 12- to 17-year-olds provides some of the first independent numbers on social networking for that age group -- and found that older girls, in particular, are the most likely to have used social-networking sites, such as MySpace or Facebook.\nThe popular sites are among those that allow users to create profiles, swap messages and share photos and video clips, with the goal of expanding their circle of online friends.\nThe Pew survey, released Sunday, found that 70 percent of teen girls, ages 15 to 17, had profiles on social networking sites, compared with 57 percent of boys in that age bracket.\nThe numbers remained much the same across racial and economic lines.\nThe survey also found that MySpace was, by far, the most popular site. Of the youth who'd used social networking, 85 percent said they used MySpace, while 7 percent had done the same on Facebook and 1 percent on Xanga.\nThe survey of 935 U.S. youth, ages 12 to 17, was done by telephone in October and November. The results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.\nWhen looking at the entire age bracket -- 12 to 17 -- Lenhart and her colleagues found that 55 percent said they used social networking sites. Not surprisingly, she said, younger children in that age range were the least likely to do so, with just over a third of 12- and 13-year-olds saying they'd created a profile. Experts say this is partly due to the fact that sites such as MySpace require users to be 14 (though they can lie about their ages to gain access).\nDanah Boyd, a researcher at the University of Southern California, says the survey results largely match what she's found in the field when interviewing teens.\nThat includes findings that girls are most likely to use social networking as a way to maintain contact with current friends, as well as those they rarely see.\nMeanwhile, the survey found that older boys who use social networking were more than twice as likely as older girls to say they use the sites to flirt -- 29 percent of older boys, compared with 13 percent of older girls.\n"One of the things to take away from this report should be a sense of 'the kids are alright,' says Steve Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies new media. "It's clear that teens are not just willy-nilly using social networking sites and making themselves vulnerable to predators"
(08/29/06 3:10am)
CHICAGO -- Some are buying homes with friends or siblings. Others barter for rent -- or live in buildings where residents share occasional meals, childcare and sometimes a car.\nIn particularly pricey areas, such as Manhattan, still others are living in "dorms for adults."\nHousing costs that can dwarf a starting salary are prodding young adults in many parts of the country to get increasingly creative about their living arrangements -- well beyond the moving-back-with-the-folks scenario.\nThey do it to save money, share resources and, when possible, to build equity. Along the way, many also see it as a chance to build community in the impersonal, big city.\n"We live in a world, nowadays, where you're encouraged to isolate yourself," says Brian Gleichauf, a 30-year-old high school teacher who grew up in suburban Chicago. "You live in your own little home, and you have your quarter-acre of grass to mow, and everybody owns their own lawn mower and everyone has their own cars.\n"It seems like an incredible waste to me."\nAmong other options, he and wife Jenny, a 27-year-old pastor, are looking into Prairie Onion Cohousing, which consists of a small group of Chicagoans who are considering converting a vintage apartment building near Lake Michigan into multigenerational, environmentally friendly housing. Building on an idea that originated in Denmark, residents would buy or rent their own units but share common areas and whatever resources and duties they agree upon.\nCreating community is a driving force in their case. But for some, sharing resources -- and a mortgage -- is a simple matter of economics, especially as interest rates have risen since spring.\n"I quickly, quickly realized I wasn't going to get anywhere on my budget," says Jennifer Quint, a 25-year-old public relations professional. After her apartment building went condo, she bought a three-bedroom house in Apopka, Fla., with brother Jason, a 27-year-old accountant. They plan to rent the third room to a friend to help with expenses -- with hopes of selling in five years to buy their own places.\nOf course, such arrangements represent a small fraction of all housing deals.\n"My sense is that it's a growing trend, but it's still a pretty small number," says Paul Bishop, manager of real estate research for the National Association of Realtors.\nMore often, experts say, young adults are stretching themselves to buy property with little or no down payment and using interest-only loans. Those financing options became increasingly popular during the recent housing boom but carry risks such as a heavier debt load and an eventual day of reckoning.\nTougher to track are the cheaper housing deals made among friends or family or set up online, where bartering on such sites as Craigslist and TradeAway is in vogue.\nAfter making an online posting, 26-year-old Christopher Stone is considering an offer of a two-bedroom house in Andover, Mass., in exchange for providing 15 hours of childcare a week for the family that owns the house. He's then looking to rent the second bedroom to someone who could provide some care for his own young children.\nIn another case, Ian McIntyre says he and friends have flitted around the world since college, staying in touch by cell phone, MySpace and e-mail to set up mutually convenient housing situations. Now in Boulder, Colo., he has landed back with a platonic girlfriend he's lived with on and off for the past five years.\n"We agree that we probably will live together until one of us gets hitched. The convenience is huge, the companionship is huge and the financial rewards don't suck either," says McIntyre, who's 25.\nCompanionship -- or that need for community -- is key for many.\nIt's one reason Karen Falcon, an apartment building owner in New York, decided to try the "dorms for adults" approach by renting rooms instead of entire apartments.\nCharging $725 to $825 per room in a four- or five-bedroom apartment -- cheap by New York standards -- Falcon goes with her gut when placing tenants with other strangers.\n"Some people are kind of short or snappy. I don't rent to those people," she says. "You can hear in a person's voice if they're respectful, considerate, kind of sweet."\nIn three years, she says she's only had a problem with one tenant.\nStill, these creative housing arrangements aren't always perfect, as the Quint siblings in Florida have found.\nAfter they bought the house in June, they quibbled over who would get the master bedroom and bath. Jennifer eventually won, but only after she agreed to take the smaller of the two common living areas as her own.\nThey also sometimes fight over noise from the TV. "And my brother doesn't seem to understand when the trash goes out," she says, laughing.\nBut she's not sorry they bought the house together.\n"It's been quite an experience," Quint says. "We get along better when we're not living together -- but so far, we've done really well"
(06/03/04 1:48am)
INDIANAPOLIS -- It's not easy to be a fan of presidential candidate Ralph Nader these days. Just ask Dallas Stoner.\nThe 27-year-old college student is a Nader die-hard -- representing that small but persistent blip of supporters who are standing tall against Republicans who dismiss Nader's candidacy and Democrats who fear that Nader supporters will foil John Kerry's run for the White House.\n"Would you like to sign a petition to help get Ralph Nader on the Indiana presidential ballot?" Stoner, armed with clipboard and pens, regularly asks his peers at festivals, concerts and on the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, a year-round commuter school better known as IUPUI.\nThe responses? "They either say, 'No' or they say 'Yes' or they say, 'Hell no, get out of my face,'" says Stoner, an environmental public affairs major at IUPUI who's also Nader's statewide coordinator in Indiana.\nStoner knows that Nader is the longest of long shots, especially in Indiana, a state not known for its support of environmental causes -- and where Nader didn't even make it onto the ballot in 2000. Facing a June 30 deadline, he and his staff have collected only about a third of the nearly 30,000 required signatures to win a Nader a place this time.\nBut the resistance, and even the animosity -- particularly from Democrats who think Nader's candidacy four years ago hurt Al Gore -- only strengthens Stoner's resolve.\n"The reasons I believe in Mr. Nader have been amplified 100 times," says Stoner, who likes the candidate's environmentally friendly stances on issues from transportation to world trade. He also sees little difference between the two main presidential candidates -- referring to them as "Bush and Bush lite" -- and to Democrats as "Republocrats."\nRecent national polls have shown Nader getting support from 4 percent to 7 percent of registered voters nationwide. Traditionally, much of his support has come from younger Americans, so it doesn't surprise political scientist Craig Leonard Brians that some college students have stuck with Nader, who's scheduled to speak at the National Press Club on Thursday.\n"The world seems so changeable at that age and that's part of the appeal of Ralph Nader," says Brians, a professor at Virginia Tech who studies elections and political behavior. "Nader isn't a spring chicken, but he says, 'We're going to try something different.'"\nDuring his swing through the campus cafeteria, Stoner collects about a dozen signatures for Nader in about a half hour and registers several more people to vote. He and his small staff spend several hours a week doing this between classes and homework.\nSome of the students who sign the petitions say they like Nader and are thinking of voting for him.\n"Our state's going to vote for Bush, regardless. So we may as well have a voice," says 22-year-old Amber Spurlock, who's double-majoring in English and anthropology.\nJoseph Arnett, a 28-year-old communications major, agrees.\n"I'll sign it, man," he says, eagerly grabbing the pen out of Stoner's hand. "You should always give people the opportunity to prove themselves."\nBut some students, including Lidelia Vazquez, a Kerry supporter, curtly refuse to sign.\n"I think he's running not to be president but because he wants to have a voice," the 19-year-old freshman says. "But it kind of upsets me. He's taking votes away from John Kerry."\nEven on campuses known for their liberal bent, Nader has lost favor.\nJohn Coffee, a history professor at Emerson College in Boston, says that while many of his students supported Nader in 2000, "only a couple" are backing him this time around.\n"The enthusiasm is not so much for Kerry as it is against Bush, who many fear will revive the draft if he keeps going on crusades to remove tyrants he doesn't like," Coffee says. "I have never seen such animosity toward a candidate as I see against Bush."\nBrians, at Virginia Tech, says he's also noted that Nader's candidacy isn't causing "the buzz" on campus that it once did. Students, he says, are more worried about jobs and the economy than Nader's trademark environmental issues.\n"Idealism," Brians says, "is in short supply."\nStill others, including 20-year-old Jared Duval, place the blame on Nader himself.\n"His message is old, too cynical and repetitive, and he comes off as arrogant," says Duval, who'll be a senior at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., this fall. "He is not seen as offering another direction, just complaining about the direction we are going."\nStoner says that he and his fellow Nader supporters sometimes get discouraged at such attitudes.\n"I liken it to environmentalism. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. It's a struggle," he says. "But that doesn't mean you're not going to go out and fight the next day."\nGetting candidates access to the ballot is a key part of that fight.\n"Little steps," he says. "Little steps toward democracy"
(07/07/03 1:23am)
CHICAGO -- Roughly two-thirds of college students play video games, but the image of a nerdy guy who spends all day in a dimly lit room blowing up computer-generated bad guys is off base, according to a new study.\nCollege gamers are not necessarily male -- or anti-social hermits. And while about a third of those surveyed admitted playing computer games during class, the games generally don't conflict with their studies, says the researcher who conducted the survey for the Pew Internet & American Life Project.\n"It's not taking the place of studying, nor is it taking away from other activities," says researcher Steve Jones, chairman of communications department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "What they seem to have done is incorporated gaming into a very multitask-oriented lifestyle."\nIn addition to the survey data, Jones drew his conclusion from observations he and fellow researchers made while watching students in college computer labs -- many of them writing papers, then taking short breaks to play computer games and send online messages to friends.\nOften, he says, groups of students stop to watch the game.\n"What we found is that it's a very social activity," Jones said.\nThe survey, released Sunday, was compiled from questionnaires completed last year by 1,162 college students on 27 campuses nationwide. Its results have a margin of error of 3 percentage points.\nAmong other things, surveyors found that 65 percent of those who responded were regular or occasional game players. Most said they played in their rooms or parents' homes.\nNearly half said gaming keeps them from studying "some" or "a lot" -- though their study habits matched closely with those reported by college students in general, Jones said.\n"There's this stereotype of game slackers wasting time, goofing off, that really isn't valid," said Marcia Grabowecky, a Northwestern University psychologist who has studied visual perception in humans, including those who play computer and video games.\nPlaying games is so common for this age group, it's almost second nature, Jones said. "It's common maybe in a way Monopoly was years ago," he said.\nNearly 70 percent of those questioned said they were in elementary school when they first played video games. By junior high and high school, about half said they had tried computer games -- software-driven games from cards to shoot-'em-up adventures such as Doom -- and 43 percent said they had tried online games over the Internet.\nDavid McNulty, a 19-year-old computer science major at the University of Maine, started playing video games, such as Nintendo's wildly popular Mario Brothers, at age 5. He now hosts game-playing parties and joins online games with people who live across the world.\nMcNulty said he stopped playing during his first semester because he was worried it would hurt his grades, but he found that his social life suffered.\nHe started playing again and said it hasn't affected his studies.\n"It takes less time to play a few games than to go downtown or see a movie with your friends. It's easier to meet them online and shoot at them," McNulty said, chuckling.\nThe survey also found that, while gaming has a reputation as a male-dominated pastime, women are avid game players, too. Of those surveyed, 60 percent of women said they played online and computer software-based games, compared with 40 percent of men. About the same number of men and women said they played video games on PlayStation, Xbox and other systems.\nThat news pleased Sarah Fenton, who is finishing up a degree in game art and design at the Art Institute of Phoenix. She said she hopes to become a character designer for a video game company and is convinced that even more women would play video games if there were more characters geared toward them.\n"I hope that we can bring a little equality to what's out there," she said.