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Seventy-eight children in custody of the Oklahoma Department of Human Services are missing.
Thirty-eight of them have been missing for more than three months.
“That is ridiculous,” said Michelle Zettee, of Midwest City, a former volunteer with the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program. “There needs to be some accountability here … When DHS has a child removed from his or her parents — especially when the reason for the removal stems from allegations of neglect rather than abuse — I feel that DHS should have as much responsibility to provide adequate supervision and ensure the child’s safety as they are attempting to require from the child’s parents.”
Program administrators believe these children are runaways.
"Our system is broken. The Department of Human Services is a mess. It's terrible for kids.We still have children dying. We still have children being moved around. The more we ignore the reality of this, our children are going to pay." said Rep. Richard Morrissette, D-Oklahoma City, a frequent critic of DHS who has called for the agency to be broken up into three separate parts to better focus its resources on children and families.
Other state child protective organizations are not without fault. According to USA Today, "All 50 states have failed to comply fully with federal child-welfare standards designed to protect kids from abuse and neglect, according to reviews (held) since 2002 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services."
Much of this is due to minimal training and overworked social workers who are poorly compensated. The California state child protective services organizationis under investigation. Another website provides information on the number of children killed while in the foster system, with states just not keeping track of runaways.
Sadly, many runaways tend to become victims of human trafficking and prostitution. A recent case in point is a 16 year old girl who ran away from an Albany juvenile facility and was considered “fresh meat” before she left the bus station. She fell victim to a sex trafficking ring that forced her into prostitution and turned her into a heroin addict.
A government study indicates the majority of female runaways are approached within 48 hours of running away, by sex traffickers. Below is an excerpt from that study.
Researchers have found that the majority of prostituted women had been runaways; for example, 96 percent in San Francisco (Silbert & Pines, 1982), 72 percent in Boston (Norton-Hawk, 2002) and 56 percent in Chicago (Raphael & Shapiro, 2002). Among prostituted youth (both boys and girls), up to 77 percent report having run away at least once (Seng, 1989). Experts have reported that within 48 hours of running away, an adolescent is likely to be approached to participate in prostitution or another form of commercial sexual exploitation (Spangenberg, 2001); however, no definitive published research substantiates this claim.
Sadly, many runaways have been throw away children, where parents have pushed them out of the house for one reason or another. In most cases, these children have been abused.
For more information on this topic and to find out how you can help, there are several not-for-profit and volunteer agencies that help homeless youth, such as San Diego Youth Services and Youth Services of Oklahoma City.
An organization, savehomelessyouth.org, was created to help homeless youth go back to school and learn how to get jobs. They are holding a walk in San Diego in October. Please consider signing up, volunteering or donating.
Adopted children beaten, starved and locked up. It is unimaginable child abuse and deputies say it happened in Oklahoma -- all while the parents pocketed thousands of dollars.
Source: NewsOk.com
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