Attend this case study and learn how children in foster care are vulnerable to becoming trafficked and how we as professionals, can block the pipeline or continue to feed it. The lives of the survivors in these stories are filled with sexual and physical abuse, death, rapes, abandonment, foster care, psychiatric hospitalization, and incarceration. After lifelong exposure to trauma, they struggle to cope and express their needs in healthy ways. These behaviors are erratic, impulsive, and sometimes violent. But the behaviors are telling us something. Are we listening? These stories emphasize the different outcomes of children's lives based on how the professionals in their lives responded to their trauma and are lessons to all of us working with survivors of trauma.
Learning Objectives:
Understand how trauma presents itself through behaviors in children in foster care.
Determine how early childhood trauma creates vulnerabilities for children in foster care to become trafficked.
Understanding the professional's role in the life of foster children is to build trust and safety so as to mitigate the vulnerabilities to becoming trafficked.
Identify unethical, inappropriate, or poor areas of professional practice that lead to distrust and increase a foster child's potential to run away.
Understand the importance of a trauma-focused and victim-centered approach when working with children in foster care.
