It was around midnight, and 13-year-old Aja was not about to follow her mother into their house. She'd had it with the beatings.

"That night that I ran away, she was drunk when she came to my school in the middle of the day," Aja says. "We went to her boyfriend's house in Hunters Point. We stayed there for hours. We caught the bus home about 11 or 12 o'clock at night. I was walking to the door and she was in front of me. I was slowing down and I was thinking in my head, 'I don't want to go in there.' She had already been talking how she was going to whoop me when we got home. We were distanced apart and I ran faster than my mom. I looked back and she had stopped, and just was looking at me. Then I started walking again and I looked back and I thought, "Why isn't she running after me?"

Aja (not her real name) is an only child. Her mom, an alcoholic disciplinarian, was physically abusive when it came to enforcing the house rules. Aja's dad spent much of her early childhood in prison on drug charges and has been periodically in and out of her life—but mostly out. When she was 10, her parents got into a physical confrontation inside a courtroom during a custody proceeding and she was placed in a foster home. After a couple of weeks, she went back to live with her mother.

The night Aja ran from her mom, she found a pay phone on nearby Alemeny Street and called the police.

"I said, 'I just ran away. My mom's abusive and I don't want to be here anymore.' They came and got me. They drove me back, asked me if I wanted her to be taken to jail and I told them, 'No, but I want to go to a foster home. I know you can do it. I've been to one before.' They said, 'it's going to take a while.' I said, 'I know, but I know you can take me to a shelter. I've been there before. I can tell you the directions. But don't tell me you're going to leave me at this house.' So they took me to a city shelter and I stayed there overnight. And that's when I went to my first foster home."

Aja, who turns 18 this fall, spent the next four years in group homes and foster placements. Whether kids are better off in dysfunctional families or dysfunctional social programs is a topic of endless debate among academics and child welfare professionals. Buzzwords, such as family and community, have been the mantra in the Bay Area's child welfare system for the last 10 years as it's shifted further and further away from group home and foster care toward family reunification and extended-family placements. The reasoning (besides the vast expense of out-of-home treatment) is that we're traumatizing children when we remove them from their families, even though some families might not be as safe and nurturing as we believe they should be.

As Aja's story shows, the issue is not that simple. The yearning for family—almost any family—is perhaps the most basic of human emotions. And yet a strong-willed young woman like Aja can find, in the often anonymous and clumsy child welfare system, the support and tools she needs to forge a future for herself. Her decision to leave home at 13 led to a lot of loneliness and uncertainty. It also made her a de facto expert on foster care and youth services, and, with the guidance of some dedicated child welfare workers, allowed her an understanding of the cycle of abuse that had shaped her life.

"I definitely believe all the stuff my mom did to me was because she has her own issues that she never tried to talk about or face or deal with," Aja says. "It's a cycle that she never tried to break because she didn't know how. She was abused by my grandmother. It was physical. I remember her brother, one of them, was also kind of abusive in other ways, which probably really messed her up. The fact that she picked my father, who made her cut her hair and locked her in the house, is a sign that something wasn't okay and she didn't really heal from her past."

Aja's abuse got worse when her grandmother died a few months before she ran away, and her mother slipped into a deep depression.

"She was drinking every day, still finding time to whoop me when I came home," Aja says. "She stopped paying our light bill for a very long time so I had to go to other people's houses to do my homework. We had to heat up our food at other people's houses, wash our clothes in the tub and dry them outside."

Aja's grandmother had been in a different place in her life when Aja knew her. She tried to help Aja avoid her mother's assaults, slipping her granddaughter cab fare so she could get away when her mother's beatings got really bad.

"She was the one person who could change the way my mother treated me at the time," Aja says. "Once that person was gone, I just felt really lonely."

Aja had run away from home with nothing but the school uniform she was wearing and her mom wouldn't let her come to the house to get her clothes. After living in the same outfit for two weeks she seized an opportunity to retrieve some of her belongings.

"This was after school and I was on the bus with my friend and I saw my mother on Mission Street but she didn't see me," she says. "Our back door never locked. Our house was really janky, you know, and I thought, 'She's not there and the back door is unlocked.'"

Aja and her friend went to her mother's house and snuck inside. They were upstairs packing her clothes when they heard her mother come in through the back door. Hiding in her bedroom closet, Aja used her friend's cell phone to call the police. Her mom's boyfriend came upstairs and peeked in the room but didn't find the girls. The police showed up and told mom they'd had a call from inside the house. When Aja heard the police talking, she ran downstairs. Her mom wanted to press charges against her for breaking and entering, but the cops said they had found drugs in the house and told mom that they would take her to jail if she didn't drop the charges.

The police took Aja back to her temporary foster home but she didn't stay for long.

"In the beginning they don't try to keep you in the system," she says. "They work on reunification if they feel like it's possible. They see a lot of cases of alcoholics and they feel like it can be worked on."

After a meeting with relatives and child welfare workers, it was decided that Aja would live in Oakland with the mother of her maternal uncle's children.

"I moved there just because it was family," she says. "They didn't have food in the house, sometimes for days. I was there for almost a year. There was certain stuff that I didn't want to tell my social worker because I knew they'd have to report it. There was a person that would come by that I was related to. I was really scared of the person. I was convinced that person would really harm me."

She did tell her social worker about the lack of food, though, and that she wanted to be back in San Francisco. There were no foster families available to take her so she went to a group home.

The goal in most group homes is to prepare the child to function in a less restrictive, more attachment-based setting. Kids are usually sent to group homes when no relatives or foster parents are available to care for the child, or when a child has needs or exhibits behaviors that cannot safely be managed without specialized, intensive treatment. Aja always believed she belonged in a less institutional placement, such as long-term foster care, because she felt her behavior was more or less safe and she craved attachment.

"I didn't need to be there," she says. "I always should have been in a foster home. The first group home I was in had hella bad kids and a lot of that rubbed off. I've gone through most of my life not fighting. I don't claim any sets. I don't gangbang. I think I'm pretty easy to get along with. I had my splurges where I felt like, 'fuck school,' but I never wanted to rebel. I never AWOL'ed."

The group home, she says, didn't feel like a family, and she left after some altercations with another resident. But it was there that Aja first started spotting cracks in the system in which she had placed herself.

"At the time I would complain about how the food sucked or how we needed better beds, minor things like that. But now, looking back, it's the whole system. It's how they hire people who only have to have a high school diploma to work there; how they pay them so little and how that affects the way they deal with us and want to interact with us. There's specific training group home staff have to do. They can't engage emotionally with the kids as much as they can in foster homes. They're actually told not to. Your foster parent lives with you. With group homes, there are different staff, different shifts, they leave and go to their own home. They're not supposed to get emotionally attached. But the population that comes into group homes, I feel, needs that attention more than anybody."

In all, Aja went through about eight placements. She got kicked out of one foster home for getting into a fight. She left another because it wasn't much better than her mother's place: often no food or laundry soap in the house; the mom worked nights and left Aja and her teenage foster siblings unsupervised.

"I couldn't sleep because people would get drunk and come into my room," she says.

At 16, while living in another group home, where she was beginning to form some bonds with staff, Aja started taking advantage of more youth services, such as the Independent Living Skills Program (ILSP). The program provided life-skills and employment-readiness classes and eventually hired her on as an intern to work on youth employment projects and advocate for foster care legislation. She developed relationships there, too, but opening up also meant taking a hard look in the mirror.

"I was reading this Al-Anon book," she says. "I broke down because most of the characteristics that I have are the result of being abused by an alcoholic—just being timid and codependent. It was really scary to see that I'm not the person I am today just because I am, but because I was abused by an alcoholic. It was really crazy. So I owe that to the system, I would say, my awareness and curiosity."

She says this knowing that many youth actively reject the system's offerings.

"This is the trending topic in human services right now," she says. "I think it's because most of our youth in foster care don't want to trust again, you know. It's something that takes them back to a place that's not pleasant and they don't want to be vulnerable to anybody. I don't know what it was about me. I should also have felt like everybody was against me, like I shouldn't trust people. But it never stopped my real personality from showing. A lot of people are in my corner. A lot of people broke the rules to help me."

These days, Aja is living in a housing program for transition-age foster youth. She's brought her grades up and is set to receive her high school diploma in December. She's already working on college essays, hoping to be accepted to one of the Southern historically black colleges, like Spelman or Clark.

"I'm looking forward to staying in one place," she says. "I'm going to be a part of something for four years."

She also wants to join a sorority.

"I really want to part of something that, one, is some positive women, and second, something I can be a part of for life," she says. "I haven't had a lot of long term relationships yet."

She's still not sure what she'll do after college. She's into photography and cooking, but can't seem to shake a calling she hears to go into social services for youth.

"There are a lot of people who are in the positions making the decisions about lives every day that they don't know anything about," she says. "I don't think there's enough people out there that have had the experience. You have the degree and you have the qualifications to be working where you are, but you don't have the life experience. The people who have the life experience don't usually have the ability to get up there in those positions. I want to be in the middle. I want to do it all."

Both of Aja's parents still live in San Francisco but her relationship with them is on and off, and she hasn't spoken to either of them in more than three months. She loves her mom and dad but is still in the process of defining, for herself, the meaning of family.

"I always dream of having a real family, like blood," she says. "But I look at the people who support me now, and I could count them as family. I don't necessarily say they're family but they've done way more than my family's done."

Still, ask Aja whether she made the right decision the night she ran away from her mom, and she's not quite sure about the answer, like maybe it's a question that doesn't need one.

"I could never really picture it, you know. We can only live life through one perspective. That choice for me to stay that night could have activated an entirely different series of events that I don't have any clue about. But I'm pretty sure I would have ended up with somebody abusive or chose somebody really abusive, because my mom made me really timid and quiet and I didn't speak up for myself at all. And I'm still working on that today. The scars can heal. I don't remember where I had my scars and my bruises, but the emotional stuff, I'm still healing from it now."