Innocence Sold: Florida’s foster system provides dangerous sex traffickers with easy access to vulne

philnotfil · Nov 28, 2022

Second of four parts, the first part was the story I posted last week about hotels stacking up thousands of violations of the 2019 sex trafficking law. This one is about how entering into the foster system increases the likelihood a child will be trafficked for sex.

Innocence Sold: Florida’s foster system provides dangerous sex traffickers with easy access to vulnerable children

But identifying who is responsible for allowing foster children to fall into trafficking is a challenge, Reid said. That’s because the Florida Legislature in 1998 voted to privatize the foster care system, leaving the care of children in the hands of contractors. In Broward and Palm Beach counties, that contractor is ChildNet Inc.; in Miami-Dade, it’s Citrus Family Care Network; and in Orange County, it’s Embrace Families CBC. They, in turn, hire subcontractors to operate group homes.
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Before privatization, the Department of Children and Families frequently made headlines over cases of neglected, abused or missing children. Privatization didn’t fix the problem, child advocates say, but deflected blame away from the state.
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“Kids in foster care ... they live with strangers,” Latham said. “These people don’t love them. … And this is what they always say about traffickers. Traffickers do love them. And traffickers will put up with anything that kid throws at them.”
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In an effort to reduce the use of group homes, Congress in 2018 passed the Family First Prevention Services Act. It told states that the federal government will only fund two weeks of group home care for foster children, with a few exceptions. Florida changed its policy in 2020 to exploit an exception for trafficking victims.
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In order to keep getting federal funds for group home care, we redefined most of our group homes as providing services for potential trafficking victims, but then we didn't do any of the things that these potential trafficking victims needed to keep them from becoming actual trafficking victims.

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Innocence Sold: Florida’s foster system provides dangerous sex traffickers with easy access to vulne

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