The two young teenagers who authorities say were sexually assaulted in Marble Falls, Texas in October were under the care and custody of the state’s Department of Children and Family Services, The Imprint has learned. The foster youth are among the hundreds who have been supervised in makeshift settings in hotels, offices and temporary shelters.
The assaults have been reported in the local press, but the fact that the victims are in the child welfare system and lacked a formal, licensed placement, has not been publicly revealed to date.
“As we have repeatedly seen, children without placement are uniquely at risk of harm, including assault, rape, and death,” said Brandon Logan, executive director of One Accord for Kids, a West Texas nonprofit serving foster youth.
Responding to the assaults in October, he added: “We should be horrified but not surprised. The ill-fated plan to park children in motel rooms and offices with inadequate and untrained staff was destined to fail them.” Logan called the recent crimes “just the latest evidence that the department has been rudderless and headed over a cliff, with Texas foster children in tow.”
Two men have been jailed for the alleged assaults in Burnet County that involve victims who are “children without placement,” anonymous but credible sources told The Imprint. The term is used in the child welfare field to describe systems that fail to properly house children removed from their parents’ homes due to abuse and neglect allegations. Texas is under court orders by a federal judge to better house these youth, who frequently run away and can easily fall prey to sexual predators.
Marissa Gonzales, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, declined to comment on the case, stating: “Confidentiality laws restrict us from releasing details about youth in foster care, especially minors who are alleged victims of sexual assault.”
‘An egregious offense’
Details of the sexual assaults and resulting arrests on Oct. 17 were first reported by DailyTrib.com, a news outlet that reports on Burnet County and the surrounding area. Two 41-year-old men have been charged with multiple counts of child sexual abuse and face decades in prison if convicted.
According to the news outlet, a forensic interview with the victims, ages 13 and 16, revealed that one of the men offered the teens a ride as they walked in the rain. After they got into his vehicle, he picked up the second suspect and drove to a hotel, where the sexual assaults were allegedly committed.
Both suspects are being held in the Burnet County Jail. Sexual assault of a child carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison, and aggravated sexual assault of a child can carry a penalty of up to 99 years. The men also face charges of promoting a sexual performance by a child, which involves the photography or video streaming of a sexual act.
“Any sexual assault, adult or child, is an egregious offense,” Burnet Police Criminal Investigator Steven Vollmar told DailyTrib.com. “Right now, we’re most concerned about the victims and seeing that they’re taken care of, not just today, but down the road.”
The Imprint received no further information from its inquiries to city, court and law enforcement officials.
But Cynthia Trevino, a lawyer representing the Burnet Police Department, responded to a request for police records by kicking the decision up to the state’s highest law enforcement official, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. “The City hereby requests a decision from the Attorney General about whether the requested information is excepted from disclosure,” Trevino stated in a letter.
Three independent sources with professional roles in the child welfare system in Texas confirmed that the victims of the sexual assaults were girls in foster care who had been living in informal settings and were not properly housed with relatives, in a foster home or in a licensed facility. They said the alleged crimes indicated the ever-present danger for children without formal placements in the foster care system, who are more likely to run away, become homeless, and fall prey to sexual exploitation and other crimes.
The three sources, who learned of the incident through their professional channels, requested anonymity due to their proximity to the state child welfare agency responsible for the teenage girls.
“Children without placement” has become an acronym in the child welfare world in Texas and states across the country: The kids sleeping on cots in county offices, in hotel rooms, churches and at times even in social workers’ cars are referred to as “CWOPs.”
Last year, Washington settled a federal case with legal advocates for foster youth who argued that these unregulated, haphazard sites were inappropriate for the proper care of traumatized youth separated from their families. The class action lawsuit filed in Seattle’s U.S. District Court stated that the housing practices relied upon by the state child welfare agency compounded children’s mental health troubles, disrupted their education and destroyed their ability to trust adults — “extinguishing any hope” for long-term stability.
‘Substantial risks’ to children
The number of children in these settings in Texas has declined from as many as 416 children in July 2021 to roughly 65 per night, state officials say.
But the state’s foster care system remains under the oversight of court monitors and U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack, who has found violations of children’s constitutional rights. Regular reports from the court monitors about progress made by the Department of Family and Protective Services have heightened the alarm, and they have repeatedly called out unlicensed placements as placing children in harm’s way.
These settings are not locked, and staff can’t stop foster youth who take off. So the children often flee.
“The monitors found substantial risks to children’s safety associated with Texas’s decision to continue housing children in unregulated CWOP Settings, such as offices, unlicensed facilities and cottages, or in hotels and motels,” the monitors wrote in a report last year.
Their September 2021 report described investigators’ findings of child-on-child sexual abuse in CWOP settings, as well as evidence that children connected from CPS offices with sex traffickers and those seeking to exploit them for sex.
A closer look at 50 children’s cases last year found they had complex mental and behavioral health needs, which require treatment and specialized care. The absence of housing stability and inadequate care in the child welfare system, contributed to the children’s suffering, investigators concluded, leading to suicidal ideation, self-harm, running away, anger and aggression. The desperation cannot be understated: Some Texas kids in these settings had harmed themselves with sharp objects, attempted to hang themselves to the point of losing consciousness, and ingested cleaning fluids.
Many of the state’s own workers have been unwilling to participate in these unlicensed housing arrangements: Approximately 2,300 Texas DFPS employees left their jobs this year, an increase of 43% since fiscal year 2021. Former staffers, social worker association heads and union officials say caring for children in improper settings is contributing to the caseworker flight.
Meanwhile, the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services has grappled with leadership turnover recently. This week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced that Stephanie Muth, a former Medicaid director at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, will replace Jaime Masters as the head of the agency early next year. Masters was appointed by Abbott in late 2019, and her tenure was marked by a steep increase in the number of children without placement and a situation in which a department employee allegedly sold naked photos of children who lived at a residential treatment center for victims of trafficking. The leadership announcement comes weeks after it was revealed that two other top officials have left the department.
It is widely known that foster children in shelters and other makeshift, poorly supervised settings are particularly vulnerable to sex crimes, including trafficking. So far, there are few details on the recent case in Marble Falls that are being publicly revealed.
But girls in temporary shelter care have been preyed upon in states across the country, investigative reports show. In Sacramento, California, “antitrafficking response teams” have worked with foster youth at a local shelter who had been “recruited, groomed and exploited,” a local agency director told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2017. She said men seeking to sexually exploit girls “are well aware” of the shelter’s location “and can be spotted waiting around for girls to come and go.”
More recently, an investigation published last month by the South Florida Sun Sentinel found girls’ chances of being trafficked increased when they entered foster care — a system designed to protect them from abuse and neglect. The news organization found that teen girls at group homes in Florida have been preyed on by traffickers who sometimes stake out a block near the home to wait for girls when they leave.
“Group homes create an unregulated environment where children can literally walk out and meet a stranger across the street,” Justin Grosz, co-founder of the legal group Justice for Kids, told the Sun Sentinel. He called it “a perfect hunting ground for traffickers.”
Sandy West and John Kelly contributed to this report.
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