On any given day, over 368,000 children populate the foster care system in the United States, each placed in the legal custody of the state due to severe instability in their home environments. At the same time, of the estimated 100,000 minors trafficked for sex each year, studies consistently show that a majority have current or prior involvement in the foster care system. This overlap is not merely coincidental, but is instead a structural consequence.
The foster care system is, by its very nature, comprised of children who have experienced abuse, neglect, or chronic instability in the formative years of their childhood. These same conditions permeate through the system itself, and are often compounded by placement instability, disrupted education, and untreated trauma. As a result, many foster youths lack consistent access to basic necessities such as stable housing, food, and emotional support. These unmet needs create precisely the conditions that traffickers exploit, and substantially contribute to this extremely high correlation between involvement in the foster care system and the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
When children do not receive their basic needs, they become more susceptible to exploitation. Title 18 of the U.S. Code, section 1591 defines trafficking of minors as “recruiting, enticing, harboring, transporting, providing, obtaining, advertising, maintaining, patronizing, or soliciting” a child for the purpose of a commercial sexual act. The law defines a “commercial sexual act” as “any sex act, on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person.” Oftentimes, “something of value” consists of things such as money, food, drugs, or a place to stay.
The foster care system often displays an intersection of prior abuse and neglect with instability, multiple placements, and continued maltreatment. Rather than protecting children of the system, these conditions deepen vulnerability by eroding self-worth and leaving basic needs like safety, love, and belonging unmet. Priorinstability in children’s lives often results in an inability “to form protective relationships with supportive adults,” leading to insufficient supervision which allows for unmonitored social media use, substance use, and overall deprivation of structured guidance. Abnormal childhoods paired with a general resistance to adult supervision normalize unhealthy relationships for children in the foster care system, while also minimizing the opportunity for others to identify and prevent trafficking at its inception.
Because abusers specifically target individuals who lack stable support systems, have experienced prior abuse, or face homelessness, children in the foster care system are disproportionately victimized. Thus, when the foster care system fails to address the structural factors that make these children targets, it transitions from an institution that protects children, into a facilitator of their abuse.
In 2014, the Obama Administration passed the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act, requiring states to develop procedures for identifying, documenting, and responding to youths at risk of trafficking, as well as to locate and respond to children who run away from foster care. The passage of this act itself reflects the insurmountable issue of sex trafficking specifically in regard to foster care youth. Despite this ongoing effort, however, state’s implementations of such mandates have been inconsistent and oftentimes inadequate. A federal audit, which examined five states including Pennsylvania, found no evidence of trafficking screenings in 65% of cases involving children who had gone missing and later returned to foster care. Documented screenings in Pennsylvania only occurred in roughly 15% of cases, and even of those in which they were administered, the screenings were largely reliant on children self-reporting their exploitation. This approach is largely inaccurate and unreliable, as many children are unaware of the reality of their situations, unable to articulate the details of their abuse, or are ashamed to disclose such.
This gap between federal requirements and state implementation has significant consequences. It reflects not only resource constraints, but also a systemic failure to treat trafficking as a foreseeable risk within the foster care population. Given the well-documented vulnerabilities of system-involved youth, screenings, though mandatory under federal law, must be proactively conducted by states rather than treated as if they are discretionary.
Trafficking screenings for all foster youth, particularly at key intervention points such as placement changes, returns from missing episodes, and discharge from care, provides a critical mechanism for early identification and intervention. System involvement itself is a risk factor, and when states ignore this harsh reality, they miss the vital and time-sensitive opportunity to interfere with trafficking, or at the very least to assist child victims of it. While federal law acknowledges the risk, current state practices fall short of meaningful implementation.
The CSE Institute encourages greater enforcement of standardized screening for all system-involved youths, as this is a necessary step to protect children who are already vulnerable due to their placement in the foster care system. Without compliance, the foster care system will continue to feed vulnerable youth into exploitation, positioning them for a period, or a lifetime, of insurmountable mental and physical abuse.
This piece is part of our first-year law student blog series. Congratulations to Tiernan McEwen on being chosen!
All views expressed herein are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law or of Villanova University.