Missing and at risk: Why children in care often run from group homes

Grayson Balzan was only 12 when the last pieces of his childhood were stolen.

A tattered, one-eyed stuffed toy dog named Puppy was one of the few items he took with him to a Dartmouth, N.S., group home when he was placed into government care. He’d had it since he was a baby.

Balzan had Puppy tucked away in his private room when another youth swiped it and hid it. The dog was eventually returned, but the damage was done.

In the first weeks of his stay, he said he remembers other kids in his group home smashing glasses or dishes, ripping posters from walls, throwing food at him, or threatening to fight him. 

So he left. 

“I would go anywhere, anywhere other than there,” said Balzan, now 21. 

For the first time, Nova Scotia is tracking how many youth in care run away like Balzan did. In the last year, group homes have reported hundreds of incidents when youth went missing and were considered at “imminent risk,” a problem the provincial department in charge acknowledges is a major concern.

The numbers come from new quarterly reports compiled by the Department of Opportunities and Social Development that the CBC obtained through a freedom of information request.

Between August 2025 and March 2026, the province tracked hundreds of serious incidents at group homes. Among them, 491 involved a missing child or youth, and it appears from the statistics that some youth are running away repeatedly.

Fewer than 150 children in Nova Scotia live in group homes, suggesting some youth are being reported missing and at risk multiple times. 

While serious incidents in group homes have long been reported on an individual level, two years ago Nova Scotia’s auditor general criticized the department for not examining them for "trends or patterns that need to be addressed." 

• Weak oversight of N.S. youth homes increases risk of improper child care: auditor
• READ MORE: Auditor general’s report on well-being of children in care

The department accepted the AG’s recommendation and in the summer of 2025 began doing this quarterly analysis. 

Group homes top spot for missing person reports

Lorna Ferguson, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Regina, believes it’s critical to pay attention to trends of youth being reported missing. 

“Missing persons kind of sits at the hub of a lot of social problems in Canada, but yet there's not a lot of attention on it,” said Ferguson, who has written multiple books on the topic.  

She said missing youth can be more likely to end up homeless or vulnerable to other dangers like human trafficking.  

Ferguson’s research shows group homes are the “number one location” where youth are reported missing, and the place where the most Canadian missing persons reports originate overall. 

That’s partly because group homes are required to report missing youth, and often the young person is found safely within hours or returns on their own. 

But buried within that larger number are some cases where young people are harmed.  

“Any case that goes missing from a group home, because of the pre-existing vulnerabilities for youth in these situations, can have the potential to turn into a harmful or negative experience for the missing person,” said Ferguson. 

According to the RCMP’s National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains, Nova Scotia police reports list hundreds of “runaway” children each year, with approximately 500 reports in 2025. 

An RCMP analysis in 2024 suggested more than half of examined Nova Scotian cases represented “habitual” or “chronic” runaway children and youth. 

Why do youth go missing?

Balzan said he left his group home because it never felt like a safe place for him. 

Being on the autism spectrum and the youngest in the group home, he said he instantly became a target for bullying and physical violence from older kids. 

After the theft of his stuffed animal, he felt he couldn't trust the group home staff. 

Balzan said Puppy had been a comfort to him in years when he struggled with sexual abuse and substance abuse in elementary school. The staff said there wasn’t much they could do about the theft. 

“I was just really distraught because I was a kid and that was like the only thing I had that was really important to me,” he said.

“I think that was a part of me realizing that, you know, it's nobody but you.”

He was young enough to get on a Halifax Transit bus for free, so he rode around the city and hung out at transit terminals. He wandered in parks at night and sat in the parking area of Dartmouth General Hospital.

One time a strange man picked him up in a car and returned him to the group home. In retrospect Balzan said that was a risky situation for a young child. 

“I was just everywhere, just like on the streets,” he said. “But in my mind at that time, it was safer for me instead of being at the group home.” 

Balzan said he continued running away from every other group home he was later placed in. 

Department deeply concerned

Jill Barkhouse, executive director of the Department of Opportunities and Social Development’s child and family well-being division, said in a recent interview she is “deeply concerned” about the numbers of missing children, and officials are trying to understand them. 

“We do work to see the child and youth behind those reports,” Barkhouse said. 

The department reaches out directly to the care provider about how to respond to each report. The child’s social worker will also meet the child to figure out what they need or how to keep them safe, she said.

Barkhouse added that children and youth have told the department that life changes can be hard for them. She said often it’s less about running away from their present situation and more about “running to” what is familiar. 

Current Nova Scotia social services policy requires group home staff to report to the province if a child is missing no longer than 12 hours from the time they are absent without approval. 

The province makes the call on when to report a child’s absence to police, which could happen immediately or up to 24 hours after they are first marked as missing. Many of those reports are received by Halifax Regional Police's vice unit.

"Youth care facilities often automatically report these occurrences as missing persons, as many of these youth are considered vulnerable," Sgt. Gena Graham, the leader of the unit, wrote in an email to CBC. 

Not all cases meet the police definition of a missing person case, though, particularly if the young person is still in contact with the home but refuses to return.   

Graham said in her experience, some youth leave group homes to go back to their hometowns or be with family and friends. She's also aware of cases where youth have left group homes to use alcohol or drugs. 

However, she explained the unit doesn't have the authority to detain a youth unless the group home gets a court order. 

Ashley Coggins-Comeau, now 27, said there were many times in her youth when a court order was issued to police directing them to find her. 

When she looks up her name on the internet, she still finds pages of results with media stories and missing person reports from more than a decade ago, some with a photo attached.

"So young," she said of those photos. "Then I thought I was old and I knew everything. Looking at it now as an adult is just like: I was a baby."

She estimates staff marked her as “gone without permission” 20 to 30 times.

Looking back, she thinks she might have made different choices if she'd been able to ask for help and guidance.

But she said it was difficult to ask for help and staff often blamed her for leaving, telling her she was "knowingly" putting herself at risk. 

She said she had some “amazing” care workers. But with others, she felt judged and disbelieved, and there was little trust between them. 

She still feels the impact today. 

“I have an issue with trusting people always because of just growing up the way that I did,” she said. 

She hopes sharing her story will encourage the public to look closely at the system for children in care, and ask questions about how well it works. 

“We all deserve better, and hopefully people start listening,” she said.

‘Their social connections are severed’

Both Coggins-Comeau and Balzan said when they were children, they felt that adults were not listening to them, and they had a limited number of people they could count on while being constantly moved around in the system. 

Balzan said he didn’t develop any solid relationships with adults, and said he often felt “looked down on” by the staff working in the system.  

There weren’t a lot of constants in Balzan’s life. Before aging out of the care system at 19, he went through six social workers and was moved several times between different group homes and schools.

Coggins-Comeau said she also bounced between various group homes around the province. 

When she hears stories of kids being moved between schools and group homes, failing to form bonds, Ferguson sees it as a “severing” of social connections.

That’s important, the criminologist said, because ties to others — even relatively superficial ties — can be the “buffer” that reduces missing incidents and protects children from harm. 

“When people are getting moved around and their social connections are severed, that's a risk factor,” she said.

Barkhouse said the department does its best to preserve social connections, and that trust is “key to any relationship.”

She said the department tries to give children stability through supporting group homes and other caregivers to use “trauma-informed practices,” and when change happens, social workers make plans to smooth the transition.

“We do our best to prevent those things from happening and unfortunately it is a reality for some,” she said. 

“In many ways, we are trying to keep the losses that children experience to a minimum.”

Aggression, sadness and anger

Balzan feels he’s in a good place in his life now. But he believes the system for children in care failed to help him and worsened his mental health. 

He thinks differently about the older youths who bullied him in his first group home. 

He is certain they, too, were dealing with past trauma: “Their aggression, their sadness, their very deep-rooted anger,” he said.

“It's just a lot of people that are struggling in one place.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: They are among society's most vulnerable: children who experience traumatic instability and end up in government care. In this series called “Left Behind,” the CBC Atlantic investigative team explores the challenges and outcomes through the eyes of people who lived through this and those trying to help them.

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