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monikerwriter · 6 years ago

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Moving Out From an Abusive Parent: A Crash Course For Minors

**The legal information provided in this only applies to minors living in the United States. I am not a legal professional, and any legal information should be researched independently by the reader.**

**Each state has their own laws about when a minor can move out of their parent’s. Research these laws. I’m not promoting minors breaking the law.**

Money

Moving out is a lot more expensive then it seems. Even if you have a place to stay (a friend, shelter, relative), there will be bumps in the road that will take a good chunk of your savings. Luckily, I had managed to save a few hundred dollars before I myself moved out

Try to get a job to save money before leaving

Try and plan this about 6-12 months before leaving, so if you change jobs they will be able to give you a good recommendation

If you can’t get a job, you can make money online.

Sadly, I have no real marketable skills, but if you’re good at drawing, writing, editing, translating, programming, tutoring, or web design, this might be the gig for you.

Websites like Fiverr or Chegg are good websites to make money online.

If you want to keep your job secret, you can make a PayPal account. They can be set up with a Visa gift card if you don’t have a bank account.

Avoid putting any of your money in your parent’s name. Your parents may drain any joint accounts or limit your access to them.

Note- Online jobs do not withhold income tax, so reserve some to pay income tax, as even work online must be taxed. However, PayPal only reports accounts that receive either $20,000 or 200 or more payments a year to the IRS (Hint hint, wink wink).

Legally, your parents are allowed to take your check from your work. However, they cannot cash it without you signing it over to them. The only way they can do this is by illegally forging your signature. To prevent your parents from taking your check, you may want to change where you work. If you want to avoid needing a work permit, try starting a job over the summer, as they are usually not required.

I highly suggest buying a Visa gift card if you don’t have a bank account (or have lost access to it). I use the Visa Vanilla gift card. It can hold up to $500 dollars, can be used to direct deposit work checks, and can make electronic payments like a debit card. I used mine to order my birth certificate and send AP scores to my college.

Documents

The worst mistake I made when I moved out was not getting my birth certificate or social security card before leaving.

Try and get a hold of your birth certificate and social security card before leaving. It will make life 100% easier. However, like in my situation, this isn’t always possible.

Birth certificates can be ordered online, in person, or by mail. Your state’s Department of Health and Human Services website will have information on this. They usually cost about $50-$60 to order.

Social Security cards can’t be ordered until you’re 18. However, you should at least know your social security number. If you work, it will be on your W2s. Your school will also have your social security number on file.

Get a State ID as soon as possible. These require your birth certificate and social security card (or W2 if you’ve filed taxes), so it’s best to try and get one before leaving.

If you’re still in school, talk to your counselor about your situation as soon as you move out. Unless you tell them abuse is occurring, they will not contact CPS. Research your state’s laws on runaway minors beforehand, as your counselor may lie and tell you that you have to go home (like mine did, even though minors that are 17 do not have to return home in Michigan).

Counselors are required to provide homeless students with resources under the McKinney-Vento law. You counselor will ask about your living arrangement and file a McKinney-Vento form. Ask for copies of this form, and try to get it as soon as possible. You do not have to answer all of the counselor’s questions (I told my counselor I was staying at a friend’s, but did not provide an address or phone number. My counselor also refrained from including my mother’s phone number or address per my request, as I was concerned about the district contacting her).

After filing this form, your counselor will connect you with a McKinney-Vento School District Liaison. It’s this person’s job to help homeless students find shelter, get transportation to and from school, and give you resources for food, clothes, and health care. If you have any health issues, this is vital.

Living Arrangements

Since I’ve moved out, I’ve been couch surfing from place to place. Luckily, I’d already planned on it being this way, and have family and friends glad to help me

Try and have a plan of where you’re going even before you start getting ready to leave

Personally I’d avoid shelters, as youth shelters (at least in my area) are usually focused on repairing the relationship between parent and child. Also, you can only stay for a limited amount of time before your parents can force the shelter to return you to their custody

Emancipation is an option, however it is tedious and extremely difficult to accomplish when living in an abusive household

Research the laws about harboring a minor in your state. If you plan on staying with family and friends, your parents might call the police on them for harboring a minor (you). Luckily, laws against harboring a minor only include minors under 17 in Michigan.

College

Being homeless can be a royal pain when it comes to going to college. Trust me, I’m doing it right now. However, most students aren’t aware how far they can go without their parents’ help.

As most high schoolers know, the FAFSA is horrible. it becomes even more difficult when you’re homeless.

Do not file as a dependent on the FAFSA. This means you’ll be dependent on your parent(s) to provide their tax information, and gives them the perfect opportunity to hold it over your head.

Minors that are considered runaways or homeless can file as an independent on the FAFSA. This means that the FAFSA only uses your own tax information, not your parents’. When filling out the FAFSA, select “unaccompanied homeless youth” in the dependency section.

Most colleges want verification that students are homeless. Remember that McKinney-Vento form? That form provides verification to colleges that you’re no longer living at home. Try to get this document before filing, to avoid any hiccups.

Many colleges provide aid for homeless students. Most programs for foster youth apply to homeless students as well. Call your financial aid office to find out what services they offer.

Welfare

Once you’re 18, you can apply for welfare of your own as long as you’re not living with your parents. However, your parents may still be claiming you, which can prevent you from receiving welfare.

Welfare recipients must declare any household changes (including you moving out) to their social worker. In Michigan, this must be reported within 10 days.

Not reporting household changes is considered welfare fraud and can lead to suspension of welfare or prosecution.

Recipients must report their household size and earnings several times a year.

If you are working, your parent(s) must provide a copy of your most recent pay stubs and a bank statement. Do not provide them with any pay stubs or documentation of your income.

If you believe your parent(s) are still claiming welfare for you, you can report this on your state’s Department of Health and Human Services website. As long as you are being claimed by someone else, you can not apply for welfare of your own.

Filing your taxes as an independent can also prevent your parents from claiming you for welfare (and makes things easier for you).

If your parent(s) receive child support, you may want to tell the parent paying that you are no longer living at home. They can go to court to end payments.

Communication

Successfully becoming independent from an abusive parent is difficult, even more so when you’re scraping for every penny. However, independent means being responsible for your own communication (between work, school, and whatever else you’re doing, you’l need it).

Do not rely on your parents to pay your phone bill. Even if they offer. Even if you are paying them for it. Get it turned off (my mother turned mine off as soon as she realized I’d blocked her, as she’d only kept it on as a way to force contact with me). You will regret it, trust me.

If your phone gets turned off, you might be tempted to buy a cheap minute phone. Don’t, it’s a waste of money, and you’ll hate having to use those annoying little buttons

Internet will take you a long way. I generally use Facebook messenger to talk to friends and relatives. However, apps like Textfree will allow you to get a free phone number. It comes with 60 free minutes of calling and unlimited texts. Minutes can be bought or earned for free by watching videos.

If you have a smartphone, try a piggyback carrier. Piggyback carriers are phone carriers that use the cell towers of more popular cell phone companies for a much lower price. Ting and Republic wireless seem to have the best reviews

If you don’t have a phone, see if your friends or relatives have a spare.

To use a different carrier than the one your phone was bought from, you will need to get it unlocked. Look at the website of the phone carrier your phone was bought from to find out how to unlock it. Do not pay to get your phone unlocked. Most websites claiming to do this are scams.

Make sure to check that your phone is compatible with the carrier before switching.

To change carriers, you will need to buy a new sim card (It must be the Sim card specified by the carrier, do not just buy one). They can usually be bought online and are very affordable (Ting’s sim cards are $1.99).

Piggyback carriers will provide information on how to change your carrier on their website. Please do extensive research to ensure you’re not being scammed.

Transportation

Take advantage of your area’s bus system. Taking the bus for the first time can be scary. It’s complicated, especially when you have to take multiple buses and end up at some bus stop you’ve never been before. However, it’s often the cheapest option.

Find out about bus passes. Since I only use the bus a few times a month, I just pay as I go. However, if you find yourself taking the bus multiple times a week, you might want to consider this.

If you are in contact with a McKinney-Vento School District Liaison, you may be able to get a free bus pass.

Do not rely on others for transportation. At the end of the day, most people are unreliable. Make sure you have a back up plan to get yourself around without others’ help

Doing the Dirty- the Move

DO NOT TELL YOUR PARENT(S)!! Even if they have told you to move out. Even if you have seemed fine with the idea in the past. Once it happens, they will try to stop you.

Try to move out when they’re not home. This will prevent conflict and keep you safe.

Do not let them be able to find you. Only let people you trust know your whereabouts. Make sure you are not being followed. Avoid sharing the names of the people you are staying with and their location. School counselors can be flaky. Do not trust them with your location.

Do not be intimidated by threats to call the police, go to court, or call CPS.

Contacting the police is likely the first thing your parent(s) will do. However, if several days have gone by without police interference, they have likely told your parent(s) that they will not take action (my mother called the police when I left, but they would not do anything since I was 17).

If the police will not do anything, it’s unlikely that a judge will tell you to go home. However, it’s likely this is an empty threat, as testifying in court would lead to their abusive behavior being uncovered. This applies with CPS as well, especially if other children are involved.

Do not assume you will be able to get anything at a later date. My mother still refuses to give me anything I left at her house. Take the important and sentimental things, not objects that can be easily replaced.

If you have to go to your parents’ for some reason, do not go alone. Bring at least one friend and have them sit on the porch. Call them on your phone and mute the speaker so they can contact the police if needed.

Mental Health and Self Care

Moving out can take a toll on you, emotionally and physically. I know it did for me, at least.

Expect to crash. Living in an abusive household puts you into survival mode. Once you begin to feel safe and come down from the abusive environment, you’ll probably become emotionally drained.

No, your memories aren’t fake. After leaving my abusive mother, I found myself constantly questioning my recollections about the abuse which caused me to leave. This is just part of the process of realizing the severity of the abuse.

Don’t expect to adapt right away. Most abused kids are experienced with adapting to difficult situations. However, you shouldn’t expect for that to happen once you leave. Going from a high tension, abusive environment to a safer one is not an easy transition. Talk about culture shock, man.

Anxiety/Depression/CPTSD/PTSD/Dissociation etc. symptoms may (ok, WILL) worsen. Like a soldier coming back from war, many symptoms will resurface or intensify once you are out of the dangerous situation.

Force yourself to function

Make sure you eat at least three meals a day. Even if they are at irregular times and spaced far apart, you need to keep eating. I found this extremely difficult, as my mother starving me mixed with stress had destroyed my appetite.

Buy food that lasts. Staple foods are cheap and easy to make. When living with my mom, I was able to fill myself up with fried rice (with egg), vegetables, and tortillas, all easy to make and nutritious enough to eat for several days at a time

Stay hydrated. If you can’t make yourself drink water, juice, pop, or coffee is fine.

Shower. If you’re not bathing, you will smell like crap. And probably look like it too. A clean face and good smelling hair will do wonders.

Interact with others. Don’t cut yourself off from your family and friends. You need a support network. However, don’t listen to anyone trying to get you to talk you into going back. You left for a reason. Don’t forget that reason.

Avoid destructive coping mechanisms

Recreational drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol will make you feel better in the short term, but we’re playing the long game here (I’m not being patronizing, I have experience)

Chain smoking cigarettes can make you nauseous and sick. If you go to the doctors or dentist, they will be able to tell and may alert your parents. If you need to cover this up, quitting cold turkey for a few days and brushing your teeth thoroughly (for about five minutes, three times a day) may cover it up (if it’s a recent habit, not an ongoing one, as nicotine causes your gums to recede).

Smoking weed isn’t the end of the world. However, don’t get into the habit of it.

Smoking can intensify PTSD/CPTSD symptoms. For example, I’ve noticed I dissociate a lot worse after smoking or a few days after while THC is still in my system.

Be careful. If you get involved in drug related crime (possession, being in a car with people smoking, etc.) you might end up being forced to return to your parent(s) if you are put on probation- juvenile court wants minors in stable households, and despite your claims of abuse (which may be discredited), they may think the best place for you is with them.

If you’re going to do drugs, smoke weed. Acid can cause permanent brain damage, and other drugs can be lethal. No one’s ever overdosed on weed. However, it can be just as addicting as any other drug, so be careful.

If you’re going to drink, be safe. Common sense is key. However, try and limit drinking to social events only. Don’t get into the habit of drinking daily or alone, as this can lead to alcoholism.

Self harm is horrible. Don’t do it, it’s painful and leave scars and is incredibly difficult to quit. Once you start, you’ll never be the same, and cravings may come and go but can last for years after quitting.

Keep Your Nose Clean

Stay on track in school. Failing grades, skipping classes, or suspensions may cause you to be placed back into your home. While I hate to say it, getting into trouble will reduce your credibility to CPS, court, and police.

Keep your head down. The best way to stay out of your parent’s is to not stand out. Avoid as much interaction with the police, your school’s disciplinary office, or court as possible. Having your name pop up multiple times may raise red flags.

Consider Contacting CPS

If you have younger siblings, you may want to consider calling CPS once you are moved out

CPS often takes what kids say at face value. My mother always trained us what to say, However, I am now able to make any claim against her without fear of punishment

Look for proof

You may find proof to back you up in text messages, pictures, or confirmation from others. I found several conversations between my mother and I that would back up my claims.

Expect the worst

If you’ve even had CPS called on you before, you might already know, but CPS workers are usually useless. They will believe whatever a child says (regardless of if it’s a lie), as long as it agrees with whatever the parent is saying and won’t dig any deeper.

If you want action to be taken, you will need a lot of proof, witnesses, and people wiling to back you up.

Breathe

Moving out of an abusive parent’s home can be stressful, disorientating, and terrifying. However, you never realize how bad a situation is until you escape it. If you’re reading this, I hope that this helps at least a little with whatever you’re going through. If you have any questions, want advice or just to vent, feel free to contact me. The system is built against victims of abuse, and having support can really help out.

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monikerwriter · 6 years ago

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Where are homeless people supposed to go?

I live in NYC and I see homeless people every day, and I don’t know what lawmakers expect from them. Our lawmakers make legislation that essentially criminalizes being homeless, but being put behind bars repeatedly for small infractions makes it impossible for them to hold down a minimum wage job. Consider this scenario.

Jane has been living paycheck to paycheck and is behind on her rent when her employer downsizes and she’s out of a job. She misses a paycheck and is evicted from her apartment because the landlord feels she’s fallen too far behind to ever catch up. Now Jane is homeless and looking for a new job. Shelters have waiting lists, and the better/safer the shelter, the longer the list. Rolling the dice and running the risk of being assaulted or robbed in an unsafe shelter is an option, but the weather is decent, so Jane decides to take a chance on the street. She uses a friend’s address on her job applications and lands an interview which leads to a new minimum wage job. She needs to save up a few paychecks before she can afford the first month, last month, and security deposit, but she’s getting by, hitting the local soup kitchens and dumpster diving for food while sleeping on the subway, on bus stop benches, in the park, etc.

The police fine Jane for sleeping on a park bench — $250 for being in the park after closing time. She obviously can’t pay it because she’s saving up for a place to live, and then Jane gets another ticket elsewhere in the city for sleeping on the subway or peeing in an alley, but this time there’s a warrant for her arrest since she failed to pay her first fine. She’s taken to jail and can’t post bond and has to wait until her case is heard in front of a judge. Meanwhile, she loses her job and has $750 in fines and court costs to cover once she’s free again.

How exactly do we expect Jane to get on her feet without major assistance from social programs who see their budgets slashed every year by the federal government?

The government finds creative ways to cut funding for shelters and welfare programs every year. There are always more homeless than there are beds in shelters and lawmakers want to give fewer and fewer funds to support the less fortunate with every budget discussion. It costs taxpayers less money to provide food, shelter, healthcare, and job training to homeless people than it costs to continuously cycle them through the judicial and penal system, but we’d rather punish people for being homeless than “give a handout” to people who desperately need help.

But how exactly do we expect homeless people to just pick themselves up by their bootstraps and make a better life? It’s hard to get a job without a place to live and you can’t pay for a place to live without a job. People have to sleep, eat, and relieve themselves in order to live, but when you have no money to afford a place to do that, those functions are criminalized. The natural processes of your body are illegal because you don’t have enough money to afford to do them.

I’m a liberal socialist because this makes no sense to me. I see homeless people sleeping over subway grates in some of the wealthiest zip codes in the country. People who routinely spend $35 for one lunch draft legislation to cut budgets for soup kitchens that can feed fifty people for less money than that. Your worth as a person should not be contingent upon your credit score, bank account, or 401K, and America has bought into this lie that rich people deserve to be rich, which means poor people deserve to be poor. And homeless people deserve to be homeless because of some character defect or flaw in their moral fiber which has forced them into homelessness, and their inability to rise above is confirmation of what terrible people they must be.

Most of the people in this country are less than three missed paychecks away from homelessness. Every homeless person you pass on the street *could be you* if the perfect set of financial catastrophes befell your life in quick succession. Think about the kind of safety net you’d wish existed if that were you begging for change, and keep those wishes in mind when you’re deciding which candidates to support for office.

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monikerwriter · 6 years ago

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Here’s a weird thing I’ve learned since I started working with the homeless: If you want to know if someone grew up rich or poor, take a look at their teeth. It seems so stupid now, but before I got this job, I didn’t really think about teeth. I went to the dentist every six months. I was bucktoothed and gap-toothed as a child, so I got braces. That’s just how life worked. Almost everyone I knew had braces. By my final year of high school, my graduating class was a sea of perfect smiles. It never once dawned on me that other families might not have thousands of dollars to spend on cosmetic dentistry. In my world, if you needed braces and cleanings, you got braces and cleanings. In the real world, thousands of children go without those things. People who live on food stamps can’t afford fresh food every day; when you grow up poor, you often grow up with sugary snacks and beverages, which decay your teeth over time.If your tooth gets chipped, broken or rotten, it gets pulled or it stays that way, because you can’t afford to fix it. And at the end of the day, you end up as an adult with dental issues. If you have nice teeth, you probably don’t realize this, but we live in a world that is fucking obsessed with teeth. Celebrities have nice teeth. Politicians have nice teeth. When you picture a rich person, a successful person, an educated person, they have a full set of gleaming pearly whites.

In our culture, we use “bad teeth” as a signal of poverty. They are shorthand for low education, for “hillbillies” with a lower quality of life. Bad teeth are not welcome at job interviews. They are not wanted in the dating scene. If you are trying to be taken seriously - at the bank, at the lawyer’s office, at your child’s school, at the doctor’s office - bad teeth will hold you back. And the consequences go far beyond the social issues. Tooth problems are painful. When you go to the dentist every six months, cavities and issues get caught early. When you go years between visits, abscesses, infections, exposed nerves and irreversible damage have time to take root. It’s an extremely painful thing to live with, it can make eating unpleasant, and tooth infections can get into your blood steam and kill you. Teeth are a health problem, and yet we price dental care like a luxury commodity. So if you meet someone with crooked teeth, or broken teeth, or tooth decay, don’t stare. Don’t make fun of them. Don’t fixate on it. That person may not have grown up with the money or nutrition that you did. Take the person for who they are, not for the teeth in their mouth. Dental care should be a human right, just like healthcare. Let’s fight for that.

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monikerwriter · 6 years ago

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Pretend, for a moment, that you’re an 18-year-old teenager from a family living below the poverty line. One day, you make a silly mistake and get a ticket for it. Nothing major - maybe you rode the subway without a ticket or smoked too close to the entrance of a building. Maybe you were loitering. Either way, one thing is for sure: you definitely don’t have the money to pay the ticket. So you don’t. Eventually, you miss the deadline to pay your ticket, and you get a letter in the mail that says you have to go to court. But your life is chaotic, and a court date for a missed ticket is the least of your concerns. Your family moves constantly, which disrupts your life and puts you behind in school. You have one disabled parent and one parent who is always working, leaving you to raise your younger siblings by yourself. You have no means of transportation. There is rarely any food in the cupboards. The utilities are constantly getting shut off. The week that you were supposed to go to court, your family gets another eviction notice, your cousin ends up in the hospital, and your parent finds out that their disability payments are being reduced. So you miss your court date. Since you missed the court date, you automatically lose your case - now you have no hope of arguing your way out of the ticket, which you still can’t afford to pay. You can do community service hours instead of paying, but you don’t have time to do that, now that you have to work part-time and odd jobs on top of everything else to keep your parents off the streets and your siblings out of foster care. You know that you probably won’t finish high school on time, let alone fulfill your hours. You might be able to explain your circumstances to the judge, but you have no idea how to go about doing that now that you’ve missed your court date, your literacy skills are years behind thanks to your constant game of school roulette, and even though legal help is available to you, you don’t know how to access it or if you can afford to do so. But that’s still the least of your concerns - since you missed your court date, the judge has also charged you with failure to appear.

Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest. And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources. So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all.

When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into.

So when we’re talking about crime, punishment and who is “worthy” of being helped, maybe keep that in mind.

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