Running Away: Drivers, Awareness, Responses

2026-07-22

Running Away: Drivers, Awareness, Responses Every year, around 250.000 children are reported missing in the EU. In 2018, 58,2% of cases reported to the 116000 hotlines were runaways . Running away is often misunderstood as a “problem behaviour” of the child, sometimes even understood as “delinquency”, while oftentimes a child is also assumed to be “safe elsewhere” as it “chose” to run away. This leads to underreporting. Despite their vulnerability, runaways are an overlooked group of children – due to the negative perception of runaways, the issue lacks appropriate attention within child protection systems, media and society in general. This project aims to remedy that. Its overall objective is to reframe runaway behaviour and move away from its common characterization as a child’s “problem behaviour”, (which leads to underreporting) towards it being seen as a clearly detectible indicator of underlying adverse childhood experiences (ACE’s) . The project aims to do this through 1. Research on the drivers of runaway behaviour, organising focus groups with experts by experience, organising a data collection from hotlines and helplines, mapping stakeholders and collecting best practices in prevention and responses to running away, 2. Based on this collection of existing evidence and good practices, developing and providing training and toolkits to law enforcement authorities and field professionals including social services, the education sector etc; and 3. Raising Awareness, running 2 awareness raising campaigns, providing advocacy tools and developing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to sustainably spread knowledge of the best ways to provide detection, prevention, and responses to running away and its underlying ACE’s, with a focus on ensuring that every child before, and after running away, can have access to a positive relationship with an adult which fosters resilience.

Belgium, Greece, Poland, Netherlands, Portugal

2026-02-15