Online Requests to Run Away: Prevalence from a Nationally Representative Sample of Youth

Background: Internet use is increasingly common among American youth; however, there is mounting concern that youth may be exposed to substantial risk online, including requests to run away. In order to glean as much information as possible about online requests to run away, we formulated two important research questions: (1) What are the characteristics of youth who have received online requests to runaway?; (2) What are the characteristics of the online request to run away including environment, people involved, context and perceived distress?

Methods: The three Youth Internet Safety Surveys (YISS-1, YISS-2, and YISS-3) are detailed and structured telephone questionnaires designed to quantify youth experiences with others via the Internet. The YISS survey is unique in that it is a nationally representative sample of youth ages 10-17, their use of the Internet, and related unwanted experiences. Across the three cross-sectional YISS studies, a total of 4,511 youth ages 10-17 were surveyed about their online experiences, including receiving a request to run away.

Requests to run away was captured using the following question: “In the past year, did anyone on the internet ever ask you or encourage you to run away from home?” (Yes/No). Distressing requests to run away were defined as incidents in which youth rated themselves very or extremely upset or afraid as a result of the incident (4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5). Participants were given the opportunity to provide details of events in qualitative form, allowing for more nuanced understandings of event context. 

Survey data were aggregated across the YISS studies and used to describe the participant population (e.g., means and standard deviations). Analysis was conducted on participants’ qualitative statements using an open-coding approach.

Results: Findings reveal that online requests to runaway are rare (n=36). Of the youth who received requests to run away, 39% were male (n=14) and 61% (n=22) were female. The vast majority of the youth were aged 13-17 years (91.7%, n=33), and came from educated households (e.g., parents with high school diplomas and above; 77.8%, n=28). The majority of run-away requests came from other youth (aged 17 years and below; 72%, n = 26), and by persons who were known by the youth in-person (e.g., a friend from school; 61%, n =22). Just over half of the youth noted that they had disclosed the incident to another person (56%, n =20); however, notably fewer reported that they had disclosed the incident to police, an Internet Service Provider, or another authority (11%, n =4). Importantly, almost half (47%, n = 17) of those who received a request to runaway found the incident distressing.

Conclusions/Implications: An important implication of the current study is carefully considering online risks, including being asked to run away via the Internet, as one of many topics that should be covered in extant safety trainings for youth regarding life skills, social interaction, safety, and technological literacy. Understanding how such experiences fit into the broader context of peer relationships and interactions is an important next step.