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 unethical, inappropriate, or poor areas of practice create distrust in children in foster care and lead to children running away from foster care, increasing their potential of becoming trafficked.
Understand how abuse, rejection, and abandonment create emotional and spiritual wounds in children in foster care that make them question their value and worth and how traffickers use emotional manipulation to exploit these feelings of worthlessness.
Implement the trauma-informed principles of unconditional positive regard to build trust and safety with children in foster care.
Implement the trauma-informed principles of affirmation to build safety and trust with children in foster care to address the feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness.
Understand how the power of safe predictable relationships mitigates vulnerabilities in foster children and how professionals have the power to be that safe and predictable relationship or be just another person in that child's life they cannot trust.
