This blog considers teenagers, because adults are generally a whole different case. We looked at residential rehab possibilities for adolescents, and at how unlikely it is that a single month (in what some might call a country club for spoiled brats) will do much good, other than to give long-suffering parents a much-needed rest.

Sad to admit, if it were legal to improvise, some parents would obtain much better results by locking their addicted child in the basement for 90 days or so, with visits from an experienced professional who is willing to do house calls. At least the patient would not be collecting recommendations from more experienced kids about where to go and whom to see, to supply themselves with addictive substances once they are back in the world.

Even sadder is the fact that for some young people in America, including many whose families cannot afford rehab, those kids may actually be better off on the street or in juvie, or even in the sorry excuse for a home that is the only thing that some alleged families seem capable of offering. Ask a 14-year-old girl which is preferable — to remain in an apartment with a sexually abusive relative, or to crash in an abandoned building with a crew of derelicts and junkies?

A conventional adult would probably say, “Well of course, no young girl should put up with being serially attacked. She should go straight to the police, or tell somebody in the school office…”

Some grownups are astonishingly naive. Can the offender be definitively locked up, and soon, and for a couple of decades at least? Because if not, any attempted prosecution is likely to cause undesirable blowback, including violent revenge on other relatives and, of course, on the girl herself. We should never take for granted that a homeless teenager is choosing that life, in preference to what we deem better alternatives.

It is hard for us to imagine the perils faced by an adolescent boy in an apparently and allegedly good home, but it would be inexcusably naive to assume that such ugly situations don’t exist. A male teenager might feel obligated to stick around to protect his mother or sister from a psychotic stepfather.

That boy might become caught up in a drug-fueled life, either to fit in better (and avoid seeming to threaten the status quo), or to find some partial and ineffective form of unreliable escape from a place where someone he loves is in peril. And revolting as this fact is, children and teenagers who happen to be male are by no means immune to sexual assault.

Rather than seek to prosecute criminally abusive parents, in most circumstances it would probably be easier to extricate the child from the dangerous environment… maybe. That is a prime danger connected with trying to help. Onlooking adults totally need to be aware of many angles. Attention from government agencies could cause worse outcomes than are already on the horizon.

One helpful contribution that onlooking adults can make is to remember that the endangered young person’s life is probably a lot more complicated than we might imagine, and that clumsy or ill-informed attempts to interfere could lead to results you don’t even want to contemplate. Messing with someone else’s life, even that of a minor child or a teenager, even with the best possible intentions, can explode into unimagined consequences. A concerned adult observer would do well to seek expert advice about whether and how to intervene.

Written by Pat Hartman. First published November 5, 2026.

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