Missouri increased tracking efforts after report found 978 foster children went missing in 2019.
Sharday Hamilton, a 28-year-old advocate for foster youth, homeless youth and runaways, still bears her own scars from running.
There’s one near her left knee. She got it as a little girl, running away from her foster mother, who was trying to hit her with a bag of frozen food but who sometimes used a skillet or a baseball bat. There are the burns she suffered when she was forced to sit on a hot stove.
Caseworkers and school counselors didn’t visit Hamilton’s foster home in Harvey, Illinois, or check in with her often enough, recalled Hamilton, now a mentor at the National Network for Youth, a nonprofit focused on youth homelessness. And when they did, she said, they missed signs of abuse. “The system failed me,” she said.
Hamilton sometimes spent nights at her friends’ houses to avoid the violence. Many foster kids in similar situations also flee — and some of them don’t come back for weeks, months or ever. Tens of thousands simply disappear from the foster care system, according to several recent reports, putting them beyond the state’s protection and at high risk of sexual exploitation.
Under federal law, state social service agencies must submit a report to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a nonprofit organization established by Congress in 1984, when a child under their care goes missing. They also are required to notify law enforcement, who report missing children to the National Crime Information Center.
But an audit published earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that across 46 states, state agencies failed to report an estimated 34,800 cases of missing foster kids. Cases include children who ran away multiple times. The average age, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, was 15.
“When it comes to teenagers specifically, most child welfare systems just don’t have the right service array, because systems are often built for babies and younger children,” said consultant and attorney Lisa Pilnik, director of Child & Family Policy Associates, a child welfare consulting and research firm.
“We don’t have enough family placements, and we don’t have family placements that are equipped to meet the needs of teenagers,” she said.
‘A lot of difficulties’
Teens often run away or go missing more than once during their time in foster care. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children report found that about 40% of foster children who were reported missing went missing multiple times — on average, four times — while in state care.
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