Abused Teens Shelter Has Wolf at the Door : Child welfare: County funding for Casa Youth Shelter and other facilities for abused or runaway children will be cut off.

She is part runaway and part throwaway, and she needs a place to stay.

But she is having trouble explaining to a counselor at the Casa Youth Shelter exactly why she feels she can’t go home. There are so many reasons. One of them is her brother, who recently beat her with a baseball bat.

“There’s no lock on my bedroom door,” said the girl, who during the course of Wednesday’s intake interview also mentioned that her drunken father once threw her out of a two-story window and that she first tried to commit suicide at age 10. Now she is almost 17, with long, blond hair, a plump, childish face and puffy eyes.

“I’ve asked them to put a lock on the door and they don’t. So I sit in front of the door to keep him out. And that’s when he stuck the knife under the door. . . . There’s holes in my door. There’s stab marks on my door and holes where he punched it.”

In the next room, Casa Youth Shelter board members had called an emergency meeting Wednesday, one day after the Board of Supervisors announced that all county funding for Casa--and the four other Orange County shelters for runaway and abused teen-agers--will be cut off in 30 days.

The move comes as a result of sweeping state budget cuts, which have left Orange County $2.5 million short for youth programs this fiscal year. Together, the four shelters and a job placement program for ex-convicts, which served 1,400 youngsters last year, will lose more than $660,000, or up to half of their annual operating budgets.

The Emancipation Training Center in Anaheim, which runs a long-term program for troubled teen-agers, depends entirely on the county money and is expected to close.

Casa’s founder, Myldred Jones, joined other youth advocates Wednesday in calling the cuts shortsighted.

“There are so many things that we spend money on that don’t get directly to people, and these kids are literally our future,” Jones said. “If we don’t spend money helping them now, in future years we’ll be keeping them in prison--which costs so much more. . . .

“If the shelters are closed, who’s going to take care of these kids?”

Casa’s 12 beds are nearly always full, and their occupants need oceans of attention. In recent months, shelter workers said, the clientele has included a 12-year-old male prostitute who was dropped off at the shelter by his customer’s limousine, a girl whose father ate her pet rabbit “to teach her a lesson” and a boy who showed up with two large bruises and a nasty bite, all of which he said were inflicted by his mother.

Three teen-agers left on Wednesday, headed back to their own homes, to Orangewood Children’s Home in Orange or to foster homes. But three others were waiting to enter, including the girl with the abusive brother. Group counselor Phyliss Phillips, an 11-year veteran, took a family history and gently told the girl that the shelter would be required to file a report of child abuse.

Even more gently, Phillips asked her why her parents do not step in to protect her. “They’re there when you do something wrong,” the girl said. “Otherwise, it’s, ‘Leave me alone.’ ”

“OK, I’m going to put down that your mother is neglectful,” Phillips said.

About 425 such troubled teens pass through Casa each year. Jones said she is determined not to cut the program, although the county funds had made up 40% of the shelter’s $389,000 annual operating budget.

Instead, Jones said, board members will devote themselves to raising the necessary money at a fund-raising dinner and auction already scheduled for Oct. 13 at the Spruce Goose in Long Beach.

If that fails, the only alternative would be to thrust the teen-agers into the overcrowded Orangewood Children’s Home for abused and neglected children, or into a foster care system that does not have enough foster parent volunteers.

“With foster homes, they want the little kids, the cute ones,” Jones said. “They don’t want teen-agers. Teen-agers are difficult.”

Several of the teen-agers interviewed Wednesday afternoon acknowledged that they can indeed be difficult.

“I was addicted to crystal (methamphetamine),” said one 15-year-old girl with a heavy-metal T-shirt and a disconcerting habit of turning the tables on the adults around her by grilling them about their behavior. “Other stuff too, but mostly crystal. I thought everything was fine, but I didn’t see that I lied all the time. I couldn’t live up to what they wanted me to be, to get a real good job, to do real good in school, never lie, respect them, all that stuff.”

Yet, to many of them, it is the adults in their lives who seem difficult and incomprehensible. The 15-year-old with the drug problem, for example, later revealed that as a child, her grandfather had punished her by hanging her upside down and beating her with a belt.

“I got mad, but I didn’t hit back,” she said. “I never hit back and I didn’t cry. After a while I didn’t feel it any more.”

Phillips estimates that 80% of the children who pass through the shelter have been physically or sexually abused or have parents who abuse drugs or alcohol. As a crisis center, Casa is supposed to keep teen-agers for only 10 days, until they can be safely reunited with their families or moved into other programs. In fact, however, some teen-agers stay much longer, simply because there is no place else for them.

While in the shelter, they take part in group therapy twice a day and have individual counseling several times a week, Phillips said.

Once a week an art therapist comes in, and the center’s recreation room is filled with drawings, paintings and collages made by the children, who range in age from 12 to 17. In one exercise, the youths take turns adding features to strange-looking animals; then each one offers an explanation of the what the animal is feeling.

“I live in a sad place,” reads one such drawing. “Everyone there has terrible lives. I wish I had a better life.”

One 14-year-old, who asked to be called Gina, showed a mobile she made of her family. The natural father who she says doesn’t want her is shown as a king holding his hands over his eyes.

Gina spent time in Orangewood two years ago after she confided in a teacher that her stepfather had molested her. She said it was a relief to be there, but she disliked the regimentation. She has been in and out of Casa four times since June and says the shelter is helping her.

“Kids need to have a place to go,” she said. “I’d probably kill myself if I was still living at home.”