A Lack of Support for Youth Calls For Trauma Informed Care
Recently, erickaingram posted a blog about the trafficking of children under the age of 18 and the lack of infrastructure to help these youth in such underground system. She mentioned,
She [Leslie Starr Heimov] noticed that in 2010, 85% of girls arrested [those involved in the sex trade] were from South LA. Compton, Long Beach and Inglewood, and 94% of the girls were African-American. Most of them were in foster care and not being able to learn how to gain connections and relationships. Pratt has helped dozens of under-age girls receive help and guidance.
I think this speaks highly to the connection between foster youth and sex tracking; the connection being a lack of support for the individual. In a youth gang intervention class I took last semester we discussed how youth who become involved in gangs suffer from a healthy development due to having no strong cohesion with the three social control agents that are responsible for a healthy development. The social control agents being family, school, and law enforcement. Therefore any breakdown in these can influence one to become involved in street
activity and anything that prevents a healthy experience often times promotes and can be decisive factor to be pushed in street life.
Many adolescents in gangs do not have the support and guidance that they need from their parents, educational system (as I talked about in the school-to-prison pipeline, and law enforcement (as seen in the increased racial criminalization). Therefore these youth seek a connection elsewhere and accept the first person that offers them help, usually a gang member. This gang member, which shares similar characteristics to a pimp, gives the support, validity, assistance, and protection they were longing for (Prof. Hernandez). The youth become part of a "family" that allows them to feel safe and as a result are pressured because of this tie and bond to the gang. The individual no longer has an identity of their own, but becomes the identity of the gang; in the case of sex tracking, the girls' identity becomes the identity of the pimp.
I think erickaingram's blog accurately shows how foster youth and gang members both share the lack of support system that has drove them to being involved in a gang and/or in sex trafficking. Therefore I think that there is a need for Trauma Informed Care (TIC) for all youth who feel disconnected from these three social control agents. Fortunately, as stated by erickaingram,
Los Angeles county is finally planning a specialized court to handle the growing number of youth in foster care that are deceived into prostitution. The court is proposed to provide an increase in the attention of judges, lawyers, social workers, and specially trained advocates.
However I think that there is a need to implement TIC with employees working in this specialized court. As stated in the TIC website,
Trauma Informed Care is an organizational structure and treatment framework that involves understanding, recognizing, and responding to the effects of all types of trauma. Trauma Informed Care also emphasizes physical, psychological and emotional safety for both consumers and providers, and helps survivors rebuild a sense of control and empowerment.
Being able to recognize trauma and knowing how to respond to this will allow us to better target youth who are following in this gang or prostitution route. Officers should be able to send children whom they suspcion to be in traumatizing experiences, also known as adverse childhood experience (found in the ACE study), and to stop youth from going through this path by being aware of how to recognize and respond to it. They should know to what service they must transfer the youth to and what kind of help them need.
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