RXP018 Karen Lambie Foster Parenting Red X Podcast: Ending Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery

Dr. Karen Lambie joins Lance and Nicole to talk about the foster care system and how it crosses paths with the trafficking of children.
Lance and Nicole welcome Sonya Edwards, a volunteer for Shield North Carolinaand foster mother. Sonya and Nicole interview Dr. Karen Lambie, a Shared HopeAmbassador on the link between foster care and human trafficking.
As the nation becomes more aware of human trafficking, it seems that the public’s reaction is to cling to tightly to their children in parks and stores. Media stories circulate about a mothers and young children followed in large businesses such as Costco or Ikea and the assumption is that kidnappers are lurking, ready to grab a toddler at the first instance that the mother looks away. But according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, less than 1% of missing children are from non-family abductions;and although those abductors have only nefarious intent, even that 1% is not comprised of all human trafficking. However, of the 23, 500 runaways reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, one in seven were trafficked.
Traffickers are typically looking for vulnerable youth to prey on. Children without homes or family. Kids who have already experienced neglect and abuse so that they can be more easily manipulated. Given those facts, it should come as no surprise that, according to the National Foster Youth Institute, 60% of trafficking victims have had the foster care system in their history. In 2018, there were more than 400,000 children in foster care.
In 2014, the US passed the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act, which requires each state’s plan for foster care and adoption assistance to develop policies and procedures for children within their care who might be trafficking victims. The Family First Prevention Actalso seeks to improve the quality of foster care by giving state agencies the option of using funds on prevention care for foster candidates to keep children placed with their families.
Although there are national and state efforts to improve the foster care system, more attention must be focused on preventing trafficking within the system. Foster children often run away from their placements, however it was until the past decade that states started passing legislation that mandated missing children from foster care be reported. Not all foster families or social workers are given adequate training on identifying the signs of human trafficking and in many states, there is a lack of resources for children who have been identified as trafficking victims.
Given the realities, to effectively address the exploitation of children, we must take a hard look at one of our country’s most burdened but overlooked social services: the foster system.
Dr. Karen Lambie has a PhD in educational psychology. There is a complex relationship between foster care and commercial sexual exploitation of children. As a foster parent, Karen learned about this connection as a foster mother. Karen had a young girl in her home who had become pregnant through her stepfather trafficking her for drug money. In her case, she was trafficked by a family member (familial sex trafficking) before she entered foster care. There are some foster parents that will actually traffic their foster children. Sonya had a child in her home who was trafficked by uncle in Texas. She was originally from Honduras and then sold to another ring in Tennessee.
Karen says that 60-80% of our trafficked children are in foster care or have been in foster care prior to. In considering children in general who are at-risk, adverse childhood events (ACE’s) must also be considered. ACE’s could be suicide of a family member, domestic violence, drug dependency, etc. These ACEs make children more vulnerable; ACE’s are often what puts children at risk of trafficking.
Foster children often want to run away in the foster care system. Running away puts t