Khalid Bahaziq, who has a Ph.D in psychology and works for the IMOWF, said police do not provide statistics on runaway girls, citing confidentiality, so the organization's estimates are drawn from the number of cases that have been brought to it.

“We had to depend on individual cases that we have received since 2005,” said Bahaziq. “We used to receive one case a month and now we are receiving more than 10 a month.”

Bahaziq said that while Saudi runaway girls may have legitimate reasons for feeling the need to escape, they make their situation worse by fleeing on their own.

“They don't plan their next step, so they end up going to the dark side of the world,” he said. “Some sell their bodies to provide food and shelter. Others deal drugs.”

Bahaziq cited one case where a young Saudi woman ran away from her home three times.

“Her family was so fed up with her attitude that they forced her to marry someone she didn’t like,” said Bahaziq. Today, he added, the woman lives in another city and works for a living.

Police Lt. Nawwaf Al-Bouq saidthat  when a runaway girl is found, she is faced with two options: Either to go back home or go to a shelter. Because of Saudi Arabia’s women’s guardianship laws, adult women who flee their guardians may also end up as wards of the state.

Al-Bouq said if a female runaway is caught repeating her offense, she is examined medically for signs of sexual abuse and is then typically taken to a woman's shelter. Being exposed to Internet and television is one of the reasons that cause young women to run away, said Salma Seibeh, a family psychologist.

“I personally blame the European and American culture that those women are exposed to through television,” said Seibeh.

“You find those young women constantly comparing themselves and their conservative families to what they see on TV shows. When they reach a dead end, they rebel and run away or commit suicide.”

But she also points out that some runaways “prefer to be poisoned in women's shelters rather than stay home with their violent parents.”

Arab News attempted to find official figures on the number of runaway girls and women in the Kingdom, but no authorities could provide definitive numbers.

It has been widely reported in the Saudi press that in 2007 850 Saudi women ran away from their houses, and 700 of them were in the custody of the Ministry of Social Affairs, which runs women’s shelters.

Other media reports claimed that 3,000 women disappeared that same year.