Today’s guest blogger is Hannah Burton.
Article Title: From the System to the Street: The factors and figures behind the so-called “foster care to prostitution pipeline”
Author: Lauren Kirchner
Date Published: February 12, 2015
This article focused on children who have runaway or aged out of the foster care system and their relationship with sex trafficking in Colorado. The author points to a sex trafficking sting that took place last year that involved 168 children. Of those 168 victims, two-thirds had never been reported as missing children. The article cites the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which indicates that 1 in 6 reported runaways were likely sex trafficked victims and 68 percent were in foster care when they ran away. Lawmakers in Colorado are trying to address this problem by targeting the issue of poor reporting practices of missing children in the foster care system. Colorado’s House of Representatives just passed a bill that would mandate the reporting of children that go missing within 24 hours to the police, FBI and the NCMEC. Lastly, the author discusses additional solutions may be to increase transitional services, training, housing for children that age out, and–as another study pointed out–strong relationships between children in foster care and their caregivers (Kirchner, 2015).
This article had strengths which promoted the validity of the content and statements that the author made. One such strength is that the author cited and provided links to several legitimate sources to support the information she discussed, including the Administration for Children & Families, the NCMEC, academic journals, and others. Additionally, upon reviewing the resources she cited, the information appeared to be translated into her article accurately. Perhaps a downfall to the article is that this issue could be much more broadly covered. This is a practical limitation for most articles–it is only a glimpse into a complex and complicated problem. However, I believe the author understood this limitation, hence why she provided several links to additional sources to compliment her snapshot of information and providing the reader with access to other reliable resources.
The article seemed to put the onus of this problem on the child’s caregivers and the child welfare systems. The author makes some valid points about greater accountability needed in the child welfare system. However, this article is one of many currently in the media that places most of the blame on the child welfare system or resource families rather than on the policies, systems and greater societal problems that also contribute to these issues. The author did point out that it is not necessarily neglect on the part of the child welfare system or caregivers, but there are some privacy laws that complicate the process of collaborating with other systems to locate missing children. The law that Colorado is proposing may be useful in working toward more accountability within child welfare systems. However, it is still placing fault on the child welfare system, rather than limiting policies and a lack of resources. I think there is a myth that exists that child welfare systems have what they need to do good work for families and children, but they just won’t do it–as if this is an issue of power and control rather than of appropriate policies and resources. I wished the article could have discussed some of the possible limitations of this proposed policy as well as the complexity of finding resolutions.
Reference:
Kirchner, L. (2015, February 12). From system to the street: The factors and figures behind the so-called “foster care to prostitution pipeline.” Pacific Standard. Retrieved from http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/the-factors-and-figures-behind-the-so-called-foster-care-to-prostitution-pipeline