Children In Social Services System Most At Risk Of Being Sex Trafficked

Among children reported as likely victims of child sex trafficking upon running away from home, most have one thing in common—they were supposed to be looked after by the government.

In 2014, some 10,000 endangered runaway children were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a nonprofit that serves as a clearinghouse for reports on missing children. Nearly 1,700 of them were likely victims of sex trafficking and of those, 68 percent were in the care of social services when they went missing, be it a group home, a government facility, or foster care.

While these sobering statistics have been reported for years by the NCMEC, more recent data suggests that the problem is even more acute.

In 2017, nearly 25,000 runaways reported to NCMEC and nearly 3,600 were likely victims of sex trafficking. Of those, 88 percent came from the social services system.

In fact, children in the social services system are the group with the highest prevalence of child sex trafficking, said Robert Lowery, NCMEC’s vice president who heads its missing children division.

The real scope of the problem almost certainly goes beyond NCMEC’s data. The FBI reported over 420,000 missing children in 2018, while Lowery said the actual number of missing children could be as high as 1.3 million a year.