Every year thousands of children go missing, but these kids don’t have posters put up in neighborhoods and Facebook posts made asking people to look for them.
The reason for this is the majority of these kids come from our nation’s broken foster care system.
Last year AZcentral.com spelled out the dark reality for those children who have been failed by adults promising to protect them:
This is the fate awaiting children who vanish while in the care and custody of America’s child-protection system. Some run to escape abuse. Some follow false promises of love and security. Still others are kidnapped outright.
No matter the reason for falling off the grid, many of these boys and girls will resurface on the black market as child sex slaves. According to the FBI, more than half of trafficked children in America were in the care of social services when they disappeared. That is a damning statistic for a system whose sole purpose is to keep children safe.
Did you catch that? More than half of the children trafficked in the United States were in social services at the time of their disappearance.
For math purposes, there are roughly 450,000 children currently in the protection of social services, according to childrensrights.org. Comparatively, there are more than 70 million people under 18 currently living in the United States.
Now, consider that more than half of trafficked victims come from that much smaller group. That’s not a “problem”. That’s an epidemic.
In 2018 Newsweek published an op-ed titled “WE HAVE SET UP A SYSTEM TO SEX TRAFFIC AMERICAN CHILDREN” that outlines the sex trafficking pipeline set up by our nation’s unbelievably flawed system.
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.”
Eighty-six percent of the kids who were trafficked were in the care of social services when they were abducted. An organization that exists to protect the most vulnerable kids is failing. They are failing so massively, it almost looks like it’s being done on purpose.
That’s because it is.
The Epoch Times reported that the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), spearheaded by Hillary Clinton and signed into law in 1997 by her husband President Bill Clinton, created a program by which the federal government sends incentive checks to states for each child adopted out of foster care—with termination of most parents’ custodial rights occurring when a child has been in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months.
The state of California, which officially labels all missing foster care children as “runaways,” has been rocked by allegations of child sex abuse in the Contra Costa County foster care system. The State Department’s 2019 human trafficking report stated that “in the United States, traffickers prey upon children in the foster care system.”
One of those allegations was covered by Epoch Times:
“On 6-13-19, members of the Antioch Police Department began investigating an extensive sexual abuse case. The abuse involved several minors that were victimized by a father and son who provided foster care for the children from 2011 through 2017,” the Antioch police department stated in the release.
“Earlier this month, Antioch detectives from the Investigations Bureau arrested Simon Mendoza Chavez, and his son Simon Magana Chavez, in connection with these crimes. Both father and son were charged with the sexual abuse of multiple children, unlawfully having sex with a minor, and lewd acts with a child,” according to the release.
Simon Mendoza Chavez was a foster parent for Contra Costa County CPS, a district attorney’s spokesman said, with 18 years of foster-care experience.
Let’s see… The government sends incentive checks to states for having more adoptions… Clearly there’s a financial incentive for the state to break apart families.
A blog on FindMyKids.org is highly critical of CPS for not doing the one thing they exist to do: protect children.
This is a worrying prospect — the thought of Child Protective Services (CPS) failing to protect children from the dangers of trafficking is sickening.
However, many statistics are now showing that CPS are falling short of their duty to protect children — who have often been neglected previously.
The system seems to carry many flaws. In 2018, the NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) found that out of over 23,500 reported runaway children — usually running from care homes — nearly 15% were likely victims of sex trafficking.
A report looking into child sex trafficking and the child welfare system, conducted by the Department of Children and Families in Connecticut, found that of 88 children rescued from child sex trafficking in the state, 86 of were involved with child protection services before being exploited.
I’m not sure “fixing” CPS goes far enough. Based on the information provided, and the fact that CPS exists to do one thing, it’s obvious the organization needs to go.
Conservative Daily Update 