The Children’s Division (CD) is responsible for the welfare of our most vulnerable children.  Over 7000 children enter the foster care system every year, in Missouri, and around as many are aging out of foster care. Many of the children, who age out of foster care, struggle with the means of life.  They are left dismayed and usually with little knowledge of who they were before they became a ward of the courts. The National Center for Exploited and Missing Children (NCMEC) reports that out of 18,500 exploited children rescued, 86 percent were in the care of Social Services. The National Foster Youth Institute (NFYI) report the FBI estimates that over 100,000 children are victims of sex trafficking. i “The contemporary sex trafficking industry involves systematic rape, torture, enslavement, and murder of millions of people, whether directly through homicide or indirectly through diseases and drugs.”​ (Siddharth, 2009)​  

In June of 2021, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) worked with Homeland Security on an operation that rescued children from sex trafficking.  They recovered 31 victims, 14 of them were missing from foster care.  One of them was only 4 years of age. In October 2021, a report came out indicating that between 2018 and 2019 over 900 children went missing from CD. A study was done to examine Missouri’s response to missing foster children. Prior to the study, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) along with metro police departments and Department of Justice (DOJ) worked together to locate missing foster children. They were given a list with the names of 94 missing foster kids and located 65; however, out of the 65, only 41 returned to foster care, 18 of these children were discharged from the care of the Children’s Division.  So basically 53 of the children on the list were still missing at the time of this study.  After prompting an investigation, the outcomes became breaking news.  But only for a second, we now hear nothing about these children; although, OIG vowed to conduct further investigation even after they identified the failure of Missouri’s CD. OIG reported that Missouri failed in that it did not comply to policies for identifying those kids who are at a higher risk of running. There were no interventions to reduce this risk, and over half the missing kids were never reported to proper authorities.  Missouri failed by not providing services to those kids who returned to care.  There are no reports of these kids seeing a doctor after returning.  They had no assessment administered to see if they had been sex trafficked.  The research indicated that some of these kids ended up on drugs and some became pregnant.  The recommendations that the OIG laid out for Missouri is to develop policies to help identify children who have a heightened risk of going missing from care, interventions that could reduce their risk of running, implement a monitoring mechanism to ensure that case managers comply with requirements and document their compliance when children are identified as missing and when they are located or returned to care, and implement improvements to the case management system to enable accurate identification of children who are missing from foster care. (Murrin, 2021)

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Laura Thomason is a Professional Manager at Boone Supported Living. She has a Master degree in Human Services, specializing in social and community services. In 2021 a report came out from Mo Federal watchdog, indicating 987 missing foster kids in the state of MO, while only 34% of these children had previously been reported as missing inspiring her to study the landscape of the Children’s Division.