Missing foster children are often gone for over a month, HHS report says & More News Here

“If they’re not in a situation where they’re being monitored and they have proper guidance, anything can literally happen,” Dan Bittner, an assistant regional inspector normal for HHS and one of many report’s authors, mentioned in an interview. “And it does happen.”

The Administration for Children and Families, an HHS division that oversees the nation’s foster care system, didn’t reply to a request for remark.

While most lacking foster children’s tales by no means develop into public, some entice consideration after their instances finish in tragedy. Rilya Wilson, then 4 years previous, went lacking in 2001 and was gone for 15 months earlier than officers observed. She was by no means discovered. In 2020, 16-year-old Anaiah Walker was discovered lifeless in the midst of an Arizona freeway after officers say she ran away from her group houses and have become a sufferer of intercourse trafficking.

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Many children who go lacking from foster care accomplish that a number of occasions, the report discovered. Between July 2018 and December 2020, state companies recorded greater than 110,000 episodes of lacking youngsters involving roughly 44,000 of the greater than 1 million children in foster care throughout the course of the research. In 5 states — Nevada, Illinois, New York, Florida and Connecticut — children who went lacking did so a median of 5 to seven occasions.

Teenagers are more likely than youthful children to go lacking, in response to the report. Nearly two-thirds of the recorded missing-children episodes concerned youngsters ages 15 to 17, whereas simply 2 p.c of the incidents have been for these 11 or youthful.

Most children included within the report have been discovered, however about 6,600 have been nonetheless lacking on the finish of the research. Of these, greater than 2,700 have been in California. But Bittner mentioned that state depends on counties to run their very own foster care applications, which makes him query the communication amongst companies and the accuracy of the variety of children nonetheless lacking in California.

California is just not the one jurisdiction to not absolutely administer its foster care program on the state degree. Ten different states absolutely or partly delegate their applications to particular person counties, the report says. This form of disjointed system, Bittner mentioned, raises questions concerning the coordination between counties when a baby goes lacking and whether or not state companies are appropriately allocating sources to seek out children.

“Having decentralized information makes it hard to gauge how big the issue is,” he mentioned.

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In 12 states, children who went lacking from foster care died. One 15-year-old who went lacking in California in January 2019 was discovered lifeless of a suspected drug overdose in Texas three days later, the report says. California officers informed the report’s authors that they believed a man accompanying the kid gave the deadly medicine.

The inspector normal’s report doesn’t embrace details about how the children went lacking — for instance, by abduction or by operating away — race, ethnicity or kind of placement setting. The authors wrote that among the information supplied by state companies was incomplete, inaccurate or not comparable between states, making it unimaginable to do a full evaluation.

State companies reported that their commonest challenges in ensuring children are reported lacking promptly after which discovering them embrace getting cooperation from the children’s households and associates, acquiring assist from police and discovering a foster care placement for children that may discourage them from operating away.

While the inspector normal’s report makes no suggestions, the authors mentioned they’d comply with up with the Administration for Children and Families about any coverage adjustments it makes in response. Bittner mentioned he hopes the company will consider why sure states seem to have worse outcomes for lacking youngsters.

“I don’t think we want these children to get lost in the foster care system,” he mentioned, “and literally lost in the eyes of the general public.”