I WAS SEX TRAFFICKED AT 16

By Edgar Walters, Neena Satija and Morgan Smith of The Texas Tribune

At 16, Jean was the more experienced sex worker in the East Dallas house. It was her job to ensure the new girl's trial run as a prostitute went smoothly. But when the girl’s john leaned in for a kiss, her body went limp, her eyes locked in an empty stare. Confused, then panicked, the man grabbed his clothes and rushed out the sliding back door to his car parked in the alley.

Jean yelled for someone to come help, knowing their pimp would be furious: No trick, no money. Then she slipped out the house's red front door to calm her nerves with a cigarette.

Jean had recognized the dead look in the new girl's eyes. All of a sudden, phantoms from her own past — ones she had "pushed down so deep and ignored so much" — were impossible to keep at bay.

Jean had come to Texas under unspeakable circumstances.

When she was nine years old, her mother had sent Jean from Missouri to rural Oklahoma to live with her father. In fifth grade, Jean's father claimed he would begin home-schooling her. Instead, he took her into a bedroom and blindfolded her, telling her she was going to have sex with a boy she liked. Then he tied her down and raped her.

The abuse continued for years. Periodically, in an attempt to dodge child welfare investigators, Jean's father packed up and moved, dragging her from Oklahoma to Arkansas to Texas. By the time they landed in Paris, Texas, in 2009, the 13-year-old was pregnant with his child.

Jean told police about the abuse a year after she gave birth to a baby girl, and prosecutors quickly built a case against her father. A judge sentenced him to 40 years in prison. Jean and her infant daughter, meanwhile, were cast into the tumultuous Texas foster care system.

Jean became one of the roughly 12,000 Texas kids in long-term foster care, or "permanent managing conservatorship," the state's designation for children who cannot find lasting homes with relatives or adoptive parents and are unable to be reunited with their biological families. It is a system where, as U.S. District Judge Janis Jack wrote in a 2015 legal opinion, "rape, abuse, psychotropic medication and instability are the norm" and children often leave more damaged than when they arrive.

It is also a system from which many children enter the world of selling sex. Eighty-six percent of runaway children in the United States suspected of being forced into sex work came from the child welfare system, according to a 2016 analysis of cases reported to the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children. Of the 79,000 child sex trafficking victims estimated to be in the state of Texas, the vast majority were in foster care or had previous contact with Child Protective Services, according to a recent University of Texas study.

"It's very easy for a trafficker to prey on those specific kids," said Dixie Hairston, who leads anti-sex-trafficking efforts in North Texas for the nonprofit advocacy group Children At Risk. "Something is going wrong. These kids are not being kept safe."

In Texas, the state agency responsible for protecting them is in crisis. Officials at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, which reviews child abuse allegations and finds homes for foster kids, say they need an additional $1 billion just to make basic reforms over the next two years, such as alleviating large caseloads for employees and addressing a severe shortage of high-quality foster homes. That's on top of the $110 million budget shortfall the agency currently faces.

Low-paid, overworked child welfare workers quit their jobs at alarming rates; one-third of investigative caseworkers leave each year. That has led to appalling delays in the agency's investigations of mistreatment, even in urgent situations where children are considered to be at immediate risk of physical or sexual abuse. Data released by the agency last year revealed that nearly a thousand of the highest-priority children on any given day had not been seen by investigators with the state's Child Protective Services division.

The agency says it has brought that number down to about 450 children each day. Investigators did not attempt to locate more than half of those kids within the 24 hours required by law. The rest could not be found.

State leaders recently approved a pay raise to keep existing caseworkers on the job and signed off on a plan to hire more than 800 new ones. But they're hesitant to provide any more of the funds the agency says it desperately needs. "We gave you the money you asked for," Jane Nelson, the Senate's chief budget writer, told the child welfare chief during a tense exchange at a recent Senate budget hearing. "We want to see results."

Jean first arrived at the house with the red door in late 2011. She had traveled there on a Dallas city bus, holding a piece of paper with a stranger's address on it, and walked nervously down the unfamiliar street in a poor neighborhood near Pleasant Grove, in East Dallas. As she approached the red door, she typed a Facebook message to her friend Anna, whom she had met at a residential program for foster youth.

"I made it gurll," she wrote.

It was not Jean's idea to run away from the facility. That had come from Anna, who had connections to an older woman who offered to take the girls into her home. After bouncing between a handful of different foster care placements, Jean had originally planned to live in the residential program until her 18th birthday, when she would age out of state custody. But she was miserable there. The secure campus imposed a rigid schedule and a curfew. Cell phones weren't allowed. And staff had to escort the girls between buildings whose doors would not open without an employee's keycard and a four-digit code.

Most of all, Jean missed her baby girl, who was then two years old. Child welfare workers had sent her to live with Jean's grandparents in Missouri. "She was all I had left after my dad did what he did to me," Jean said. At the time, a suicidal Jean was sent to a psychiatric hospital. "I wanted to die," she said. "When CPS did that, I said, 'I'm done. They can go to hell for all I care.'"

She stuffed everything she could not wear on her body into a backpack. On the way to school, she prayed the oversized bag would not arouse suspicion. Then, walking past her classmates, she left school grounds to catch a bus.

After two train transfers and another bus trip, Jean looked at the red door and composed herself. She knocked.

The long-term foster care system sets children up for a series of rejections — from their biological parents, other relatives, an emergency shelter, a long-term shelter, a group home. They may be separated from siblings, and go through a handful of caseworkers and family placements. Sometimes, emotionally fragile children turn to the underground sex industry, where pimps promise them the security and affection they crave.

"I have interviewed hundreds of children, and I can't tell you how common that story is," said Chuck Paul, a former special investigator for the state who tracked down children who ran away from foster care. "You seem to get bounced around all over the place, no one seems to want you or care about you. What's the only recourse this child has if they're upset?"

More than 1,000 Texas children in long-term foster care ran away between September 2015 and August 2016, the majority teenagers. One in four did not return.

The state only began tracking sex trafficking among recovered runaways in late 2015. In 2016, child welfare officials reported just 31 incidents. That number is surely an undercount because trafficking victims usually do not come forward, and child welfare officials acknowledge that not all children who run away from the state's care are even reported to proper authorities. It takes the agency about six weeks to find the runaways they do recover. Trafficking experts say many runaways will be approached by a pimp within two days.

"When you get past 48 hours, it's a very dangerous time," said Angela Goodwin, the Department of Family and Protective Services' director of investigations. And teens don't always want to ask for help.

"They're not going to call 911 and say, 'I've been a victim of human trafficking, can you help me?' — and that's the type of victim the system is designed for," said Michael McMurray, a detective in the Dallas Police Department who worked on Jean's case. "When you've got an uncooperative victim who does not want to go back home, does not want to be recovered and rescued, does not want to give you information about the person who's been exploiting them, the system tends to break down."

When Jean knocked on the red door needing food, a bed and a change of clothes, it was Jasmine Johnson who answered.

In her early 20s with cornrow braids, a scar near her left eye and tattoos on her neck, hands and arms, Johnson had grown up in Dallas, where she says the streets had given her the pimp title. She was a regular at lesbian bars, known to surround herself with pretty girls who danced at local strip clubs.

Johnson's was a home unlike any Jean had been in before. Johnson and her girlfriend smoked marijuana and drank liquor freely. They gave Jean a cell phone and new clothes from J.C. Penney. They let her skip school. Jean felt suddenly like an adult. A photo from one of Jean's first nights at the house shows her nestled into Johnson's living room couch, wearing large hoop earrings, smirking and flashing a middle finger at the camera. She was enjoying herself.

Within a few days, the atmosphere changed. Johnson told Jean she owed rent money and would need to find a way to come up with a few hundred dollars. At first, Johnson suggested she dance at strip clubs, but Jean couldn't get in without a fake ID.

Johnson told her she'd need to earn her keep another way: selling sex.

The prospect of having sex with strangers for money scared Jean. But returning to foster care sounded even worse. “I was willing to do whatever I needed to stay away,” she said.