The Texas Committee on Juvenile
Phoro by Susan Madden Lankford
State Rep. James White, R-Woodville said:
The people in East Texas want to see something done now. If you know where these places are, just go today. Shut them down today. We don’t have to wait for the legislature to gavel in and do more.
Angela Goodwin, Director of Investigation with Child Protective Services says in the fiscal year 2016, there were 973 children in Texas foster care who were reported “missing”.
She says only 633 of those kids have been found, and several dozen of them reported that they had been sex trafficked.
Goodwin said:
We stress with our staff the urgency. That they have to report right away to local law enforcement. They have to assign it to one of our special investigators who are former law enforcement immediately. This is in our protocol and our policy that we train our staff, that these cases are urgent and have a sense of urgency.
Lawmakers pressed the testimony on why nothing is being done immediately and why state agencies aren’t knocking on doors trying to locate these children right now. Some pointed out the timing of this hearing—on a week where families should be together giving thanks, nearly 300 children are still missing.
Dixie Hairston, the Anti-Trafficking Coordinator at Children at Risk said:
We are just thinking about in financial year 16 for DFPS, 32 kids were recovered that self proclaimed that they had been victims of sex trafficking. We don’t even have enough beds for those kids.
Hairston says the problem goes beyond just finding these kids. She says there are only 26 beds across the entire state of Texas for any child that needs to go to a foster care placement who has been trafficked. There are 350 beds across the U.S.
Hairston said. “What we need to do right now is figure out a way that we can get these kids services as soon as they are recovered.” Hairston says the lack of resources means that these kids end up placed in other state programs that are not appropriate for the trauma they have experienced:
This is happening to the most vulnerable children in our community. If law enforcement goes out, they do a sting operation and they do recover a child, where are they going to take them after they recover them. There are just not those places out there.
Child safety groups such as Children at Risk are asking lawmakers to further fund Child Protection Services to it can hire specialized caseworkers who deal with only foster kids who have been sex trafficked.
