The Alarming Disappearance of Youth in Foster Care
photo credit: https://www.vecteezy.com/free-vector/missing-poster">Missing Poster Vectors by Vecteezy</a>
Summit still haunts me.
Something Grace said when she and her sister shared about their lives in foster care has shaken me to the core.
Thousands of youth in foster care DISAPPEAR each year.
I thought about how our former foster daughter took off one evening after work, and we had no idea where she was until the state found her several days later 60 miles from our home. Another one of our campers left high school one morning and didn’t return for months. Both experiences were so surreal, especially seeing the missing poster on the news with our camper’s picture.
Sarah Blankenship shared an article with me from January 2021 entitled, Disappearing and Dying: Why 20,000 kids disappear from foster care every year and how to end this crisis.*
“No one looks for us,” Withelma ‘T’ Ortiz Walker Pettigrew is quoted in the article. “I really want to make this clear. No one looks for us.”
This chilling statement was made on October 23, 2013, when T testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Human Resources. She went missing from foster care at age 10. Her kidnapper raped, beat, and sold her for sex across the western United States. T escaped at 17 and is now a child and human rights advocate. She was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2014.
The authors stress three key takeaways:
· In the past 20 years, the cases of over 100,000 missing foster children were closed before the children were located. Some cases were closed as quickly as six months and on children as young as 9 years old.
· An unknown number – but easily in the thousands upon thousands – of kids who disappear from care are trafficked. Children who have been recovered from sex trafficking report that they are given a quota of up to 15 buyers per night. This means a sex-trafficking victim may be raped thousands of times a year.
· On an average day, 55 children will disappear from the U.S. foster care system – the very system charged with keeping abused children safe.
With such sobering statistics, is there anything we can do?
One of the solutions highlighted by the article is mentoring. The authors write, “Pair at-risk foster children with mentors . . . Children need an adult in their lives who they know cares about them. Research suggests that mentoring programs for teenagers in foster care can reduce incarceration and homelessness rates while improving educational and employment outcomes for these young adults.”
T.R.A.C.life is designed to connect campers with camp volunteers. Join us in praying for every T.R.A.C. to start a T.R.A.C.life mentoring program. We long to see every camper mentored.
Teen Reach is literally saving lives . . . one mentoring match at a time.
*Olsen, Darcy & Rebecca Masterson. Disappearing and Dying: Why 20,000 kids disappear from foster care every year and how to end this crisis. The Center for the Rights of Abused Children. January 2021.