Using Prevention Science to Develop the Child Welfare System’s Response to Child Sex Trafficking

Involvement in the child welfare system can be both a result of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and an ACE in and of itself. Youth in the child welfare system placed in out-of-home care are at high risk of being victims of human trafficking, with numerous documented cases of child sex trafficking among this population in all 50 states. In 2014, P.L. 113-183, the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act, was implemented to benefit children and youth in the child welfare system. In response, a university and child welfare system partnership was created to build greater awareness and a more coordinated response to child trafficking in the child welfare system. As a part of this partnership, multidisciplinary approaches to training were developed in order to improve the identification and protection of children and youth at risk. The presentation will focus on the development of this university-child welfare system partnership to address child sex trafficking; the situational and cultural contexts that put children and youth most at risk for trafficking; and how prevention and identification of victims can be prioritized so that child welfare systems can improve their response to victims’ needs, as well as prevent secondary trauma upon recovery. This session will explore the latest data on the overlap between child welfare and sex trafficking and discuss the pilot of a comprehensive training intervention designed to equip child welfare professionals with the knowledge and skills necessary to serve this vulnerable population. Participants were child welfare workers who completed surveys before and after the pilot training sessions. Paired t-tests showed that differences between participants mean scores on the pretest and posttest were statistically significant (p<.001) in all three survey domains – knowledge, beliefs, and self-efficacy. These results suggest that the trainings are increasing participants’ knowledge of trafficking, shifting their beliefs around trafficking issues, and increasing their self-efficacy to identify and respond to youth victims of trafficking. Thus, the university-child welfare system partnership is a promising approach to better preparing the child welfare workforce, which may, in turn, result in improved well-being of children and youth who have been sex trafficked or are at risk for being trafficked.