Most people don't know about our nation's foster care to sex trafficking pipeline, but the facts are sobering. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) found that "of the more than 18,500 endangered runaways reported to NCMEC in 2016, one in six were likely victims of child sex trafficking. Of those, 86 percent were in the care of social services when they went missing."
The outcomes of law enforcement efforts against sex traffickers repeatedly support the NCMEC estimate. In a 2013 FBI 70-city nationwide raid, 60 percent of the victims came from foster care or group homes. In 2014, New York authorities estimated that 85 percent of sex trafficking victims were previously in the child welfare system.
In 2012, Connecticut police rescued 88 children from sex trafficking; 86 were from the child welfare system. And even more alarming: the FBI discovered in a 2014 nationwide raid that many foster children rescued from sex traffickers, including children as young as 11, were never reported missing by child welfare authorities.
Beth Breen, the driver contracted by Arizona DCS to drive young Devani from the foster home where it was later learned she was repeatedly raped by her foster parent who was arrested for running a child pornographic and child sex trafficking ring out of his state-approved foster home, to her parents home 90 miles away each week for a 2-hour supervised visitation, was recently interviewed by Jim White at Northwest Liberty News.
Breen states that she is under a gag order and not supposed to speak about the case, but she “doesn’t care” because the gag order is unconstitutional.
This is one of the most horrific cases Health Impact News has ever covered. See our previous coverage:
Arizona Child Removed from Loving Family and Placed into Foster Care Where She was Repeatedly Raped – then 80% of Body Burned
Arizona Girl Raped and Burned in Foster Care Still Represented by Same Attorney – Kept Away from Family
Trial Begins for Little Arizona Girl Placed with Pedophiles in Foster Care and Burned by Adoptive Mom
Beth Breen explains how she thought it was strange that they would place this little girl in a foster home so far away from the parents, 90 miles away, and that due to the fact that she drove her once a week 180 miles total, that she actually spent more time with Devani than her parents did.
[h=2]Foster Care: “Best Interest of the Child” or “Child Abuse”?[/h] Theoretically, foster care provides a temporary loving, nurturing and safe home for children who are removed from their own families due to heinous neglect or abuse. This theory helps those involved in the system sleep good at night and feel like heroes.
Molly McGrath Tierney, the former Director of the Baltimore City Department of Social Services, gave one of the most insightful TEDx talks about the problems with the “Foster Care Industry” – an industry where children become a commodity that profits doctors, lawyers, judges, social workers, advocates, and other organizations, an industry that can only exist by taking other people’s children, an industry that damages the very children it purports to be helping. She goes on to explain the trauma inflicted on children by the foster care industry, saying:
… we’re digging a wound so deep, I don’t believe we have a way of measuring it. This dismantling of families – it has enormous consequences. Kids that grow up outside of families – they don’t master the things that can only be learned in that context, like who to trust, how to love, and how to take care of yourself, and that frankly does more damage than the abuse and neglect that brought the kid to my attention in the first place.
https://humantraffickingsearch.org/us-foster-care-system-a-breeding-ground-for-human-trafficking/US Foster Care System a Breeding Ground for Human Trafficking
Posted by Michelle Lillie | 2013
Half of all human trafficking victims are minors, and slaverynomore.org statesthat 70 percent of these minors are children in the foster care system. Foster
Focus Magazine, an online publication devoted to the US foster care system, places
that number even higher at 80 percent. In a report by the state government of
Connecticut, 86 percent of victims rescued from domestic minor sex trafficking in
2011 had been involved with child welfare services in some manner and may had
been victimized while in foster care or residential placement.
These statistics are especially disturbing since there are an estimated 300,000
children involved in underage domestic sex trafficking in the United States which
means 210,000 to 258,000 children have been failed by the very system that
was created to protect and provide for them. Children in the foster care system
are especially vulnerable since many have experienced trauma such as physical
violence, substance abuse and parental incarceration. Children with no family and
no support system are easy prey for pimps who initially shower the girls with gifts
and attention. Many pimps pose as boyfriends or protectors to gain trust of the
young girls. Shockingly, it is often fellow housemates working for the pimps who
recruit other members of the foster home or shelter into prostitution.
According to The National Report on Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: America’s
Prostituted Children, “children exploited through prostitution report they typically
are given a quota by their trafficker/pimp of 10 to 15 buyers per night. Utilizing a
conservative estimate, a domestic minor sex-trafficking victim would be raped by
6,000 buyers during the course of her victimization through prostitution.” After one
to two years of this horrific treatment, most children are either too sick or injured
from the brutality to be of any use to the pimps and are simply discarded on the
street. Children have not yet fully developed their natural immune system and are
more likely to be infected by diseases like AIDS, Syphilis and Hepatitis B. Since the
average age for a child to enter forced prostitution is 12-14 years old and most die
within seven years of their first sexual act, very few child prostitutes make it to
adulthood. The few that do reach their 18th birthday will have aged out of the foster
care system leaving them without food or shelter.