Ben Westwood was about nine when he first went missing from his family home in Rugeley, Staffordshire. It was a spur-in-the-moment decision to run off with the £10 note his mum had given him to go to the chip shop. Looking back, Westwood does not remember exactly what he was running from, whether it was a bad letter from school, the bully his mum was dating, their continuous fights, the shouting, or the feeling of being a burden, but he does not blame his family for it nor their decision to put him in care short after that. “I just felt I was better off out,” he says. “Running away was just a liberation from the feeling of being unwelcome and causing friction at home. When I ran away, I felt like I was unbound from all the negativity and for me, that’s what it was about, to seek peace.”
Every day in the UK, an estimate of 144 children under 16 run away. Only one third of them is reported missing to the police and the vast majority goes missing from care. Eighteen thousand young runaways every year end up sleeping rough or with someone they have just met. And although most children return or are found safe within the first 24 hours, 8% of them stays absent for longer than a week and 65% of them will do it again.
“The first time I ran away, it wasn’t for long,” says Westwood. “I went out for the day, I was trying to reach this town called Stone, 10 miles away, but I never made it there. I ended up sleeping in a ditch near a forest. I remember seeing a few coppers, thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be mad if they were looking for me?’ A couple of days later, I had a breakdown, I hadn’t really slept, hadn’t really eaten, I had nowhere to go and no money. So, I tried to flag down some cars and after a bit, a nurse pulled over. She took me to her place and rang the police. The police said they were half an hour away from putting me on the telly, and that helicopters had been trying to find me all night.”
Westwood was brought back home, his mum happy to see him. But not long after that, the urge came back, and he ran away again. This time, he went to Lichfield, 10 miles away, where he stayed for two weeks. “I started running away to local towns, 10, 20, 30 miles away. I once found myself in Birmingham. I would just bag some clothes; sometimes I would take nothing. I’d sleep in public toilets or just half an hour in a park, my head on my arms. When I ran away to London, then, it was mostly on the streets.”
Children in care are particularly at risk of running away. According to research, one in 10 children in care will go missing compared to one in 200 children in general. Julie Taylor, a nurse scientist and expert in child protection, says: “Children in care may have done it more often, there might be a pattern, but it happens all the times that these cases are not followed up. We work with a downstream river approach. There’s the river and I am stood at the bank and look at all these children floating past me. Some are bleeding, some are gasping. And while we should be going upstream to find out why they are falling in the first place, we follow a rescue model and limit ourselves to resuscitate them on the side of the river.”
At 11 and a half, Ben Westwood was now living with his third foster family. One day, he was given £90 by his foster mum and instructed to wait at home for the “bill’s man”. “I had never seen that much money in my life. I ran to the train station and jumped on the first train to Coventry. I wanted to see the football stadium there,” he says. “But when I got to Coventry, I saw on the train screens ‘London Euston’. I didn’t even know if it was London the capital city, I thought it was a village called London Euston. I asked this bloke and he said it was the capital. I thought, ‘Cool, let’s go.’”
“My first night in Whitechapel was really scary. I had never seen a down-and-out with like three coats talking to himself before. I didn’t know what schizophrenia was, I thought, ‘This guy’s gonna stab me up.’ The police came around the house where I ended up, looking for a murder charge. The East End was scary at the time. But then I got to understand mental health a lot more and I wasn’t scared anymore.”
And so, it started for Westwood, this cycle of running away to London, being reported missing, and being brought back to a foster family or children’s home in the West Midlands, only to run off again. “The children’s homes were chaotic, I didn’t really have negative feelings there, but I think what happened when I started running away to London was that I’d get these big adrenaline hits when I got off the train and I’d see police officers and try to hide and then I’d get away with it and my heart was beating. I ended up getting addicted to that adrenaline kick.”
Westwood says he was often reported missing, but the photos of him that circulated at that time looked nothing like him. “I remember seeing one and thinking, ‘No wonder nobody found me. I was like 13 or 14 and that picture was from when I was eight. I had a completely different hairstyle, and I’d put on weight over time.” Sometimes, he thinks the police knew exactly who he was, that he was 14 and a runaway, but wouldn’t do anything. “I think there’s this unwritten rule that runaway children are given less of a chance because they’re just troublesome and they’re just gonna do it again,” he says.
Although Westwood thinks that there is much more trauma awareness today and a better understanding of mental health issues, he thinks that there are a lot of failings in the system. “Social workers would constantly move jobs, nobody understands your whole journey by reading it off a piece of paper. Some social workers in the children’s homes were a positive influence, but there wasn’t a lot they could do.” According to Taylor, children in care are moved around too often and the agencies might fail to follow up with schools or neighbours because they are in a different area.
Ben Westwood is now 36, has a minimum-wage job and a flat for himself. Looking back, he thinks he was lucky to get out of that lifestyle. “I was very lucky. I could have become involved in prostitution, could have got into crack or heroin, could have been groomed by predatory people or end up doing crime… you don’t know what roads go down after that.”
“There was a couple of bright souls that I met around the West End, they were artsy people, they showed me another side of my homelessness, away from the drugs.” At 16, Westwood ended up running away one last time. “My whole life was about survival until then, begging on the streets, waiting to be 16, when I could make my own decisions and didn’t have to live where I didn’t want to live.”
“I ran away one last time after leaving young offenders. I started seeing people my own age walking down the street with their girlfriends and other friends, and that’s when I looked at myself begging in the doorway and realised that wasn’t my life and it was degrading.”
He went back to the hostel, where he had been lying about his age in the past and got a place. From there, things started falling into places. Ben Westwood wrote a book about his childhood, Poems From a Runaway (self-published, £7.99), which he hopes could help young runaways find a little bit of hope. “When I was younger, people would ask me why I was running away – the police, social workers, my foster parents. I didn’t know, I was on auto-pilot, searching for peace. Now, looking back, I can see how depressed I was, going missing for months, sleeping in doorways, I was lonely.”
Young people go missing for different reasons, from family conflicts to abuse and neglect. Understanding the reasons behind their desire to leave is extremely important, but so is to offer them protection, a safe place where to go and the possibility to tell their own story. Taylor says: “Children may run away because something is happening at home that it’s not right or they might be running to something. But the term runaway is too benign because it suggests that the child is doing the running, it puts the onus on them, rather than on the circumstances that cause them to go missing.”
According to Taylor, research needs to focus on what services children who go missing might need and trust, how to raise awareness of those services, and ways to examine patterns of behaviour to better understand why a child goes missing in the first place. “Children might have heard of Childline, but they probably wouldn’t think to call them if they were running away. They might think it’s for someone who’s been abused, not for someone who feels left out or fed up or runs away because their parents are using drugs and neglect them. We need more awareness around these services.”
Poems from a runaway: A true story by Ben Westwood can be bought online at this link.