Mum desperate for help as teen son exploits housing loophole

Young, underage and at-risk youth have been exposed exploiting a legal loophole that allows them to live away from home and beyond the control of their parents.

The term, known as "self-placing", gives children the power to select a new home, outside the power of police and child safety authorities.

Single mum Loretta from Maryborough told A Current Affair her 14-year-old son recently decided to self-place.

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"Parents have no right when it comes to teens 'self-placing' and running around," Loretta said.

"The police actually have no rights to help with that and child safety have no rights.

"I was quite serious to a social worker and I said, 'I need him home'.

"She said, 'You're not going to keep him home'. And I'm like 'I will lock him in' and she said, 'That would be illegal.'"

Since relocating out of home, Loretta says her son has stopped attending school and has been caught taking items from a local fishing shop.

"I found fishing lures and fishing equipment and I went, 'You don't have any money, how did we get this?' and he told me the shop had given it to him," Loretta said.

The single mum to four children then went on Facebook and discovered a photo of her son.

"That was the first thing that popped up on our community page - the fishing shop saying, 'Boys can you come back and pay for these items?" she said.

Down the road from Loretta's home in Maryborough, Bob Davis runs Operation Hard Yakka - a military style camp for at-risk youth.

Davis says he hears similar stories regularly from other parents.

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"I would say five, six per cent a bad parents - the rest are good parents out there trying their best," he said.

The youth camp has a 90 per cent success rate of transforming the lives of youths who undergo the program.

Davis is now reapplying for Queensland government funding after the former Labor government cut assistance to his program.

Among the funding on offer is a new Regional Reset program established by the new Queensland government, targeting teenagers at risk of turning to a life of crime.

"The sooner we can get them, the better - make them understand that they're being very selfish because they're hurting the ones that love them," Davis said.

Loretta says her son occasionally comes home for brief stints, but this time he's been away for two weeks.

That's despite recently breaking his leg.

She checks his bedroom every morning, hoping he's snuck home overnight - but it hasn't happened.

Her message to her son?

"Please come home, please."

This week, the Queensland government also announced a review of out-of-home care for youths as part of its Commission of Inquiry into Child Safety, with scope to include an examination of the self-placing legal loophole.