ATLANTA – Legislation U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., introduced to protect children from online abuse and exploitation has been signed into law.
President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan REPORT Act Tuesday, which Ossoff introduced in partnership with Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.
The bill requires websites and social media platforms to report crimes involving the trafficking and enticement of children to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Companies that knowingly and willfully fail to report child sex abuse material on their sites will face increased fines.
“My bipartisan law with Senator Blackburn will ensure tech companies are held accountable to report and remove child sex abuse material and to strengthen protection for kids online,” Ossoff said. “At a time of such division in Congress, we successfully brought Republicans and Democrats together to protect kids on the internet, and now our bill is law.”
“Children are increasingly looking at screens, and the reality is that this leaves more innocent kids at risk of online exploitation,” Blackburn added. “Under this law, Big Tech will now be required to report trafficking, grooming or enticement of children found on their sites.”
Ossoff chairs the Senate’s Human Rights Subcommittee, while Blackburn serves as the panel’s ranking Republican. An investigation they launched early last year to assess the safety of children in foster care found lax oversight by federal and state child welfare agencies when it comes to missing children.
Ossoff cited audits of multiple states that found 45% of missing child incidents were not reported to the NCMEC and that most missing children were not screened for sex trafficking after they were recovered.
The NCMEC endorsed the REPORT Act as well as a companion bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“The REPORT Act provides critical child safety improvements,” said Michelle DeLaune, the NCMEC’s president and CEO. “We look forward to continuing our work with Congress to prioritize the safety of children online because every child deserves a safe childhood.”
ATLANTA – U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., vowed Thursday to help two federal agencies responsible for child welfare to develop the tools needed to protect foster children from abuse and neglect.
The Senate’s Human Rights Subcommittee, which Ossoff chairs, launched an investigation last February to assess the safety of children in foster care.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) found in October that between 2018 and 2022, 1,790 children in the care of Georgia’s foster care system were reported missing. During a hearing of the subcommittee last month in Atlanta, witnesses testified that children missing from foster care are particularly vulnerable to sex trafficking.
“What is happening to foster children across the United States is not acceptable,” Ossoff said Thursday during another hearing held by his subcommittee. “The number of children who are going missing from foster care is unacceptable.”
Ossoff and Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, the subcommittee’s ranking Republican, criticized lax oversight by federal and state child welfare agencies when it comes to missing children.
Ossoff cited audits of multiple states that found 45% of missing child incidents were not reported to NCMEC and that most missing children were not screened for sex trafficking after they were recovered.
Blackburn said the federal government can’t find 85,000 missing migrant children.
“We’ve seen reports of these children working in factories (and) food processing plants,” she said. “We should not have to read more reports of children being used for child labor or sex trafficking rings.”
Jose Perez, deputy assistant director at the FBI, said one of law enforcement’s biggest challenges is end-to-end encryption, a technology that allows participants in organized criminal rings to communicate with each other without anyone else gaining access.
Perez said the FBI’s 56 field offices operate more than 85 task forces across the country. Investigators prioritize cases involving missing children ages 12 and under who have gone missing under suspicious circumstances, he said.
“If we believe it’s a kidnapping, that’s an all-hands-on-deck scenario,” he said.
Rebecca Jones Gaston, commissioner of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration on Children, Youth and Families, said her agency requires state child welfare departments to submit plans outlining their policies. Those that don’t meet federal requirements are offered technical assistance so they can improve, she said.
Ossoff said making sure states have adequate policies for dealing with foster children isn’t enough.
“Putting something in a policy manual is not always implementing that policy in practice,” he said.
Jones Gaston said ensuring polices are put into practice is up to state and local child welfare agencies. However, her agency can and does issue corrective action plans and assess penalties if those policies aren’t followed.
Ossoff said the full Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing next month to hear from CEOs of tech companies on steps they’re taking to protect children from online predators.
ATLANTA – Georgia youths in the custody of the state’s foster care system are disproportionately likely to become victims of child sex trafficking, several experts in the subject testified Monday.
Between 2018 and last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 2,400 reports of children missing from foster care in Georgia involving 1,790 children, many of whom went missing several times throughout the year, Samantha Sahl, supervisor of the national nonprofit’s Child Sex Trafficking Recovery Services Team, told a U.S. Senate subcommittee at a hearing in Atlanta.
Of those missing children, 410 were identified as likely child sex trafficking victims, she said.
Sahl and other witnesses blamed the trend on children who run away from horrendous conditions they suffer in foster care settings resulting from systemic failures by the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS).
“We know we have an urgent issue when children feel better on the streets or with a trafficker than they do in their foster-care placements,” Sahl said.
Monday’s hearing on conditions in Georgia’s foster care system was the third in the last two weeks held by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Human Rights, chaired by Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga. At the first hearing, Ossoff revealed the results of a DFCS internal audit that showed the agency failed in 84% of cases brought to its attention to address risks and safety concerns.
The second hearing as well as Monday’s testimony focused on the number of children under DFCS supervision who end up missing.
DFCS officials responded to the first two hearings with a letter accusing the subcommittee of failing to request information or responses from DFCS in advance of the hearings and charging the panel’s investigation has been political in nature.
On Monday, Brian Atkinson, a staff lawyer with The Wilbanks Child Endangerment and Sexual Exploitation (CEASE) Clinic at the University of Georgia’s School of Law, said his experience shows entry into Georgia’s foster care system puts children at risk of being trafficked.
“If a child’s caregiver, family, friends, communities, and the state fail to provide for their basic needs of food, shelter, safety, security, love, their survival instincts kick in and they search for other ways to have those needs met, heightening their risk of landing straight in the hands of traffickers,” he said.
Tiffani McLean-Camp, 19, gave personal testimony Monday of her experiences when she entered foster care at age 15 after being physically abused by adoptive parents and sexually abused by a family friend. She said the abuse continued while she was moved to various placements 20 times.
McLean-Camp said one of those placements was in a facility with a gate surrounded by barbed wire. where she was physically abused and overmedicated.
“It felt like being in prison,” she said. “It made me feel like an animal locked up in a cage.”
After she became pregnant and her son was born prematurely, McLean-Camp said she and her infant son were separated at times and then placed in an emergency shelter where she got no attention for post-partum depression or physical complications from her pregnancy.
She said she got no visits from her DFCS case manager and received no help from the agency.
“I had to learn everything on my own,” she said. “I had to teach myself.”
“No child should have to go through the experiences you have survived,” Ossoff told McLean-Camp following her testimony.
Atkinson said he believes the foster care system has made progress in embracing the concept of treating children who fall prey to sex trafficking as victims and not criminals. But he said too many victims still are cast in a negative light, which makes them less likely to get the help they need.
“When our clients reach out to DFCS, they’re met with disbelief, dismissiveness, and often no response at all,” he said.
ATLANTA – The state agency in charge of Georgia’s foster-care system has responded to allegations of failure to protect children with a letter harshly critical of an investigation launched earlier this year by U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.
“The misstatements, omissions and failure of the subcommittee to request relevant information or responses from the (Division of Family and Children Services) in advance of its publicized hearings and press conferences leave the unfortunate impression that the goals of this investigation are political,” several lawyers for the agency wrote Wednesday in a letter to Ossoff.
The Senate Human Rights Subcommittee, which Ossoff chairs, held two hearings last week and this week to hear testimony on the state agency’s treatment of foster children. At the first hearing, he unveiled a previously undisclosed internal audit that revealed the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) failed in 84% of cases brought its attention to address risks and safety concerns.
During the second hearing, two juvenile court judges said DFCS Director Candice Broce suggested some children with mental and behavioral problems be locked up in juvenile detention centers in violation of state law while the agency looked for somewhere to house them.
Ossoff also held a news conference during which he reported nearly 1,800 children in state custody were reported missing between 2018 and last year.
In their letter, the DFCS lawyers wrote that the subcommittee never shared with DFCS the information Ossoff obtained from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, leaving DFCS no way to respond.
“It is not clear whether the numbers the chairman shared with the press account for children who were recovered or children who aged out and refused to sign back into foster care (even though they were located),” the letter stated.
“What we do know is that a recent report by the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that Georgia’s rate of foster children reported missing is lower than its neighboring states of Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina, and is less than half the rate of a number of other states – including New York, Ohio, Maryland, Nebraska, Delaware, and Kansas.”
The DFCS lawyers went on to deny the juvenile court judges’ testimony about putting children behind bars.
“Commissioner Broce did not encourage judges to violate state law, and it has never been DFCS policy to punish a child with complex needs through detention,” they wrote.
The letter also outlined the progress DFCS has made in reducing the number of children housed in hotels or DFCS offices and the need for the General Assembly to increase the agency’s funding.
“Ultimately, the courts and DFCS are in this fight together,” the lawyers wrote. “(They) must stay focused on productive efforts to improve Georgia’s child welfare system.”
ATLANTA – Nearly 1,800 children in the custody of the state of Georgia were reported missing between 2018 and last year, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff revealed Friday.
Ossoff, D-Ga., obtained those numbers from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as part of an investigation a Senate subcommittee he chairs launched eight months ago.
“These numbers are deeply troubling because these are more than numbers. These are children,” he said. “And according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services … children who go missing from care are left more vulnerable to human trafficking, to sexual exploitation, and to other threats to their health and safety.”
Ossoff’s remarks Friday came two days after the Senate Human Rights Subcommittee heard testimony from a Georgia mother whose two-year-old daughter was murdered after the Georgia Division of Family & Children Services (DFCS) placed her in the care of her father’s live-in girlfriend. Another young woman described her ordeal of abuse and neglect while essentially held captive in Georgia’s foster-care system.
Ossoff reported during Wednesday’s hearing that a DFCS internal audit showed the agency failed in 84% of cases brought to its attention to address risks and safety concerns.
Of 1,790 children in the care of DFCS who were reported missing, the national center’s review found some children were listed as missing repeatedly. As a result, the center documented nearly 2,500 episodes of missing children in the five-year span.
A federal law passed in 2014 requires state agencies to report a missing child to both law enforcement and the national missing children center within 24 hours of receiving information about a missing child under their care.
“This investigation is ongoing,” Ossoff said Friday. “The subcommittee is working actively to analyze data and produce additional findings. … This is about vulnerable children who deserve protection from abuse, who deserve sanctuary from neglect. And that is why I will continue relentlessly to investigate failures to protect the most vulnerable children in our state.”
