USA
Children removed from unfit families and put in foster care are
terrifyingly vulnerable to being trafficked, a fact that Amy Andrews
knows all too well.
She spun in and out of her abusive family
home into the child welfare system, starting when she was 10 years old.
By 14, she was selling sex on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, working for
traffickers who exploited her naivete and need for attention.
“I’m loved, I’m wanted, I’m cared for, I’m given everything I want and
no one blames me,” Andrews said of being trafficked. “And I’m being
sexually abused, but I can overlook that.
“Nobody wanted me.
This set me up to be vulnerable and needy,” she told the Thomson Reuters
Foundation.
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. children live in
foster care, prey to predator sex traffickers who may find their young
victims at bus stops, shopping malls or street corners as well as on
social media and online chat rooms.
Often removed from abusive
or negligent families, girls and boys in foster care are at high risk,
said Dorchen Leidholdt, legal center director at Sanctuary for Families,
which advocates for domestic violence and sex trafficking survivors.
“Traffickers go for our most vulnerable, and kids who are or were in
foster care are the most vulnerable children in our society,” Leidholdt
told the Foundation.
“These predators know all the signs and look
for them.”
Traffickers can tell that “you’re the kid who doesn’t
have any family,” said Andrews, who now at age 43 works with trafficking
survivors.
Having no one they trust makes children in foster
care vulnerable, experts say.
“Kids in foster care, they don’t
really have parents or certain individuals or a caring safe adult that
they can go to or that they can confide in,” said Kristina Fitz, a
trafficking survivor who works as a case manager with the Los Angeles
area Children’s Law Center.
“They’re the quickest ones to fall
into the hands of an exploiter.”
The added threat of online
culture dispels the protective notion that children should not talk to
strangers, said Lisa Goldblatt Grace, who runs My Life My Choice, an
anti-trafficking and exploitation group in Boston.
“They talk
about being friended by a friend of a friend of a friend,” she said.
“Many still get recruited by face-to-face meetings, but it’s a real mix
of the two.”
“You're damaged”
My Life
My Choice helps children in foster care and group homes who often have
pasts filled with sexual and physical abuse, paying attention to threats
posed on social media.
“Exploiters actively look for kids with
this kind of trauma history,” Grace said. “Kids learn that their body is
not their own and that if you tell, nobody believes you, and that you’re
damaged. Those are the exact same messages that a pimp wants to teach a
girl.”
More than 437,000 children in the United States were in
foster care at the end of 2016, according to the Los Angeles-based
National Foster Youth Institute.
Last year, one in seven
children reported missing was likely a victim of sex trafficking and of
those, 88 percent were in the care of child welfare when they went
missing, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children (NCMEC).
“They are more vulnerable to the manipulation and false promises that
traffickers make,” said Staca Shehan, who heads the case analysis
division at the Virginia-based organization. “I don’t think kids in the
child welfare system have well developed skills to thwart these
efforts.”
The center runs NetSmartz Workshops to educate
children about potential online risks, using cartoons and games to teach
younger children and using teens sharing firsthand stories to reach
older children.
Those in foster care are at particular risk of
being trafficked when they “age out” of the system at age 18 or 21,
depending on where they live, experts say.
“We have cases of
clients who literally were trafficked the day they were kicked out of
foster care,” said Andrea Powell of FAIR Girls, an anti-trafficking
group in Washington. She said more than two-thirds of the girls
involved with the group are in the foster care system.
Sense of belonging
In the San Francisco, California
area as well, about two-thirds of the youth who have been trafficked for
sex have had some link to foster care, according to Alia
Whitney-Johnson, executive director of Freedom FWD, an anti-trafficking
group.
“A lot of them, they want a sense of belonging,” said
Jenny Cheung Marino, firm director at the Children’s Law Center of
California which works with exploited children in Los Angeles County.
“They’re coming from broken homes, a lack of love, lack of a father
figure. Traffickers know where to find them, at bus stops, at certain
group homes unfortunately,” she told the Foundation.
A key way
to minimize the danger is placing more children with their own relatives
rather than with strangers in foster homes or group homes, said U.S.
Representative Karen Bass, a California Democrat and longtime campaigner
for foster care reform.
Placement with relatives can give
children that missing sense of belonging or caring, Bass told the
Foundation.
“Every youngster that I’ve ever talked to who was
trafficked says the same thing – “They didn’t come looking for me.
Nobody cared. They didn’t bother to come,’” she said. “And that’s
criminal.”
By Ellen Wulfhorst
3 May 2018