Someone is missing. Nobody's seen them for weeks. Where could they be? Expect the police to decide they're The Runaway. And, one thing's for certain: when you hear that, the odds are good that they didn't.
Sadly, this is Truth in Television on both sides. Sometimes people really do run away. Other times, they're part of a population that is historically mistreated or neglected, especially by the police.
However, this is also convenient in stories for multiple reasons. The clearest, and most obvious, is that it answers the question of why the police aren't investigating and gives the audience a very clear reason to think that the Police Are Useless. It gives the protagonist a clear and obvious motivation to need to take over where they've failed. It’s also very difficult to prove or disprove, except in cases of Finally Found the Body.
It's also a staple of Not the First Victim and a form of Chekhov M.I.A.. Compare Never Suicide, which is another common, but less sinister, explanation for a death that turns out to have some form of third-party involvement.
Often leads to Seeking the Missing, Finding the Dead if a character decides to go looking for the so-called runaway. Contrast with Disposable Vagrant and Kill the Poor, when homeless characters may have run away, but are then preyed upon.
Not to be confused with He's Just Hiding, which despite the title, is an audience reaction, though it's still about people who are dead being thought to have run away or been in hiding instead.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- In Gannibal, everyone in the village assumes that Osamu Kano ran away because he'd amassed too much gambling debt. The only one who doesn't believe this is his daughter Mashiro, who insists her father didn't gamble at all and would never have abandoned his family. Naturally, it turns out that she's right.
- WORKING!!: Inverted. Aoi "Yamada" claims to be an orphan, with a story so full of Blatant Lies that Souta Takahashi immediately pegs her as a runaway using a fake name.
Comic Books
- Cinema Purgatorio: Discussed at the end of Hushed Up! One of the Fatal Officers gets a call from the station that a child's been reported missing, which he bets the parents were responsible for.
Fan Works
- This
fan-created cover of "Don't Go By The River" by Voltaire based on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic at one point mentions a mare who disappeared after visiting the Everfree Forest. One lyric is "The locals say she ran away, but you know they la la la la lied!"
- Missing (Miraculous Ladybug): When Marinette doesn't resurface even after Ladybug defeats an akuma that made its victims vanish, Lila tries to convince the police that the other girl must have run away from home, even claiming to have seen her meeting up with an older man. In reality, the problem is that Ladybug got hit by the akuma's powers without realizing it and has forgotten her civilian identity, staying transformed and focusing on patrolling Paris for any signs of Hawkmoth.
- Running on Air features a partial Subversion when it comes to Draco's disappearance: he did run away from home. After three months, however, his father caught up with him, and during the ensuing confrontation used a time-turner that effectively stranded his son outside of time itself.
Film — Animated
- The Rescuers: Rufus the cat initially thinks Penny ran away from the orphanage, but she turns out to have been kidnapped instead.
Film — Live-Action
- Disturbing Behavior: Gavin tells Steve that he saw Andy kill Mary-Jo in a police officer's presence, but that he can't prove it and that everybody's saying she ran away.
- Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The Thompsons notified the police about their sons being missing, unaware that they have shrunk. One of the cops assumes they might have run away due to their dad apparently being too hard on his eldest son, but tells the cops that both their sons are happy and could never have run away.
Russ Sr.: Why do I feel like I'm the one that's on trial here?
Mae: You can't imagine, dear.
Russ Sr.: What do you mean "you can't imagine"?! - The Night of the Hunter: After Harry kills Willa, he lies to the townsfolk (the Spoons particularly) that she has run away and left him a note.
- The Pale Blue Eye: Landor's daughter Mattie eloped, and was disowned by him as a result. Except she didn't. She committed suicide after being gang-raped, and Landor concealed the true circumstances so he could hunt down her rapists.
- Stir of Echoes: Debbie's mother says that her older daughter, Samantha, ran away. She's actually the girl that was murdered in the house.
- Under the Silver Lake: A classic subversion. After Sarah disappears, characters constantly speculate to Sam that she has simply moved. Sam resolutely believes differently... then he tracks her down and she actually has run away to join an underground suicide cult of rich and powerful men.
- Werewolves Within: Cecily tells Finn near the start that Jeanine's husband left town with his mistress for Belize. Finn actually discovers his gored body under the porch at her inn.
Literature
- American Gods: The town of Lakeside is a quaint little town time seems to have forgotten. Occasionally a teen, bored with the town, runs off to the big city never to be seen again. It's sad but is treated as a fact of life by the townsfolk. Shadow discovers the actual truth though, that the children are being sacrificed by Hinzelmann in a ritual to keep outside influences from changing the town. He uses the town's yearly ritual of putting a clunker out on the frozen lake and waiting to see when the spring thaw causes it to sink, drowning the children and hiding the bodies at the same time. When the ruse is discovered, the lake is dredged and dozens of bodies are discovered in the trunks of every car sent down.
- The Cat Who... Series: In The Cat Who Saw Red, Qwill reunites with his first love Joy, who is married to a ceramic artist that Qwill instantly despises. Later in the story, Qwill writes her a check so she can try to get away from him, but a few days later the check bounces because someone tried to change the amount for much more than what was in his account. He confronts her husband, who shrugs and says that Joy ran out on him and isn't as innocent as Qwill wants to think. Her running away is accepted as the official story, but Qwill isn't buying it. The husband is lying, of course. He killed Joy and put her body in his kiln to destroy the evidence, then tried to cash the modified check.
- Cracked Up To Be: Parker's missing friend Jessie is a Chekhov's Gunman who is mentioned to have run away at the beginning of last summer. It's revealed that Parker actually witnessed her rape and murder, which is what caused her downward spiral.
- In Disappearing Earth, Lilia is assumed to have ran away, with her case largely being dismissed due to Missing White Woman Syndrome. This stops people from realizing she was kidnapped by the same person who later kidnaps two (white) girls until much later.
- I Hunt Killers: The victim that actually got Billy caught — the murder of a high school girl — was presumed to have run away to L.A. Only G. William Turner believed differently, which led to Billy's capture.
- I Stop Somewhere: When Ellie is missing, after being raped and murdered by Noah and she's assumed to have run away, which only her father Alex doesn't believe. When the thaw comes months later, her body is finally found and the truth discovered.
- Living Dead Girl: Ray tells Alice that her parents think she ran away, especially after "the horrible letters she sent". It's not clear if this is true or just Ray's manipulation technique.
- Millennium Series: Mikael raises the possibility that Harriet Vanger ran away, which Henrik shuts down. Then comes the revelation that Harriet's father Gottfried, and then her brother Martin, were serial rapists and murderers. Mikael and Lisbeth naturally assume that Harriet was murdered. Only for it to then turn out that she wasn't; she survived, and ran away, making this a subversion.
- Room: At least in the book, it's heavily implied that, while she was actually kidnapped by Old Nick, Ma's parents thought that she had run away for reasons they didn't understand. The police suggested that she might've been a drug addict, despite no evidence of this.
- Things We Have In Common: Invoked by Yasmin. When she sees Sam stalking Alice, she looks for other people he might've kidnapped and comes across Amelia Bell on a missing persons website. She looks uncannily like Alice, and Yasmin immediately jumps to the conclusion that Sam might have killed her, even though she's described as a runaway.
- Tony Hill and Carol Jordan: Jacko Vance's victims are all teenage girls, and are all believed to have run away. Even though Donna's mother knows that her daughter wouldn't run away, she is unable to convince the police of this.
- Troubled Blood: Downplayed. It's briefly discussed that Margot might have run away with Satchwell, who she was (incorrectly) believed to be cheating on her husband with. Cormoran and Robin consider the possibility but dismiss it pretty quickly. And, in fact, Margot was murdered by a Serial Killer.
Live-Action TV
- Dark (2017): The series begins with the teenager Erik Obendorf being missing without a trace for weeks. Ulrich Nielsen, the local police chief, seriously doubts that actually a crime happened and Erik just ran away, as he has already done that a few times before. Only after Ulrich's own son is missing too and the corpse of another boy is found, he and the police in general starts investigating seriously. As it turns out, while Ulrich's son is still alive, but travelled to 1986, Erik actually was abducted and died in a failed time travel experiment.
- Diagnosis: Murder: This is the fate of Mark Sloan's father in the episode "Sins of the Father." Mark had always thought he had run out on the family. He had actually been sealed in a tomb while investigating a case.
- Forensic Files: Several cases involve people going missing but are presumed to have run away for whatever reason, until either something happens to cause the police to no longer consider it likely... or until the body shows up.
- Midsomer Murders: "With Baited Breath" features a variation, the entire village of Solomon Gorge believes Lola Silverman ran away after she left with her suitcase following a major fight with her mother Isobel ten years ago. Isobel likewise regularly receives postcards from all over the world from Lola to tell that she's safely traveling. In reality Lola was killed in a road accident whilst coming back to her mother, with the killer hiding the body and writing the postcards to sell the illusion.
- Unforgotten: Hayley Reid, the victim of Series 3, was dismissed as a runaway by the officers investigating her disappearance at the time. When her body is eventually discovered twenty years later, the lead detective feels extremely guilty.
- Nearly every Unsolved Mysteries segment involving a missing child has their parents insisting on this, and although the cops still have to consider the possibility, it's clear that they ultimately agree. In particular, the case of Kari Lynn Nixon, who vanished while walking home from a local convenience store. One of the lead detectives cited numerous factors about her case before adamantly declaring "She is not a runaway. She is the victim of a kidnapping." note This has also applied to adults, as while some people will suggest that they opted to abandon their old lives and start new ones elsewhere, while others staunchly insist that they would never abandon their families/children (particularly in the cases of missing women) note
- Vera: In "Old Wounds", the police refused to investigate Carrie's disappearance, dismissing her as a mere runaway because they didn't want to spend time searcching for "a mere miner's daughter" who happened to be biracial. This led to her parents' Grief-Induced Split.
Video Games
- From Next Door: The Son collected newspaper clippings about the disappearance of the young boy next door, who the police dismissed as a runaway despite his parents' protests. He was a victim of the creature.
- Life Is Strange: Everybody in Arcadia Bay except Chloe believes that Rachel Amber ran away. Even Max has a moment's hesitation upon finding concrete evidence that Rachel was planning to run away and go to LA. However, Chloe was right all along. Rachel was murdered by Nathan Prescott at the behest of Mark Jefferson.
- Night in the Woods: Mae is surprised to come home to find her old friend Casey has up and disappeared, with his parents putting up "Missing Persons" signs all around the area. No one else, including Mae and the rest of Casey's friends, are particularly worried, as Casey often talked about wanting to hop a train and escape their Dying Town, and the lack of communication is chalked up to him wanting to make a clean break. Naturally, the truth is much more sinister. Casey was actually kidnapped and murdered as part of a cult ritual.
Web Animation
- Don't Walk Home Alone After Dark: In The Pine Creepers, some people believed Pike Lister, a trouble-making teenager who went missing in November of 1994, just took off by himself. However, others thought he might've drowned in the lake, while Jordy and his dad are convinced the Pine Creepers "got him", especially as something similar occurred back in The '70s. It's implied that Jordy and his dad were right, as Jordy himself is taken by the Creepers.
Western Animation
- South Park: The plot behind "City on the Edge of Forever" is that the bus strands on the edge of a mysterious cliff during a blizzard. When the kids are trapped there for an extended period whilst Ms. Crabtree searches for help, the parents and school faculty automatically jump to the conclusion that they ran away.
