A teenage Oxford runaway tells how she lived with drug addicts and fell pregnant while living rough in a major TV documentary tonight.

Staying Lost, showing at 9pm on Channel 4, tells how the 16-year-old, named only as Danielle, left her parents' house in Oxford and moved into a squat in an old railway station in Brighton.

She said: "I left home on a bad vibe and everything was really terrible. I left my mum and my dad not knowing where I was, not knowing how I was, not knowing why I left." Danielle, nicknamed Dizzy, and her friend, Beanie, lived in a squat with five men who used heroin before being evicted and taken to a police station.

The police contacted Beanie's parents and she spoke to her mother for the first time in months.

Beanie was so upset she returned home the next day leaving Danielle alone.

The teenager became disillusioned with the drug culture at the squat and decided to leave.

She said: "There was always an element of fear in the squat because you didn't know who was going to come in and how they were going to be towards me because I'm a young woman. "There were always needles everywhere, which I was scared of, and I was always scared that someone was going to die.

"It was difficult trying to be somebody instead of just being homeless in a squat."

Danielle spent a week sleeping rough under Brighton's pier before her friend James, 20, asked her to move in with him.

They started a relationship and two months after her 16th birthday Danielle was expecting their baby. She claimed housing benefit and she and James moved into a one-bedroom flat.

Danielle said: "When you've got nothing else you can afford to be crazy."

But she said she would not go back to life in the squat.

Kate Hart, services manager at Oxfordshire social services, said: "We would urge young people who don't feel they can contact their parents to talk to someone else who can help."

Story date: Monday 01 November

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