Identifying Patterns of Child Welfare Involvement and Socioeconomic Conditions Prior to Commercial Sexual Exploitation: a Statewide Case Study

In response to recent federal legislation, the child welfare system assumed primary responsibility for responding to commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) of children. CSEC complicates the notion of child maltreatment because, unlike other forms of maltreatment, it can simultaneously involve the behavior of abusers and constrained action by the child, often requiring distinct safety planning and service provision. Further, this form of abuse is uniquely embedded within the economy. Historically, much of the available research on the subject approached youth involvement in the sex trade as a form of delinquent behavior, rather than an experience of maltreatment. Emergent contemporary research on CSE indicates that early experiences of sexual abuse and child welfare system-involvement are strongly associated with subsequent CSE risk and victimization. Administrative child welfare data can be leveraged to fill some of the existing empirical gaps, and efforts have been made to document associations between CSE victimization and system involvement. However, much of this research focuses exclusively on youth already being served by the CWS. The relationships between child welfare interventions, case characteristics and subsequent CSE remain largely unexamined. This dissertation is based on a unique dataset constructed using administrative child protective service records and American Community Survey data. The final dataset captures 13,193 children with documented concerns of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) identified by California’s child welfare system between 2015 and 2020 and includes maltreatment allegation information on 3,205 de-duplicated reports of suspected CSE submitted to child protective services (CPS) in Los Angeles County, California between 2017 and 2021. Three analyses were conducted to address the following unanswered questions: (1) Do child characteristics and CWS involvement histories of children with identified CSE concerns differ from CWS trajectories of similar children? (2) Are there identifiable subgroups of young people facing CSE risk and/or victimization that have distinct patterns of prior CWS involvement? (3) Is CSE reporting associated with neighborhood-level concentrated disadvantage in Los Angeles County, California? To answer these questions, three distinct analyses were conducted. One relied on a case-control comparison of child welfare trajectories prior to the identification of CSE risk or victimization. The second used latent class analysis to identify subgroups of children with known CSE risk or victimization based on their CWS involvement. The third analysis used geo mapping and logistic regression to describe allegations of CSE in a Los Angeles County and test for an association between CSE reporting and neighborhood-level concentrated disadvantage. Findings indicate that among all youth with identified CSE risk or victimization experiences, nearly all had been reported to the CWS at least one month prior to the first identified CSE concern, yet less than half (43.4%) had prior cases and under one-third (32.1%) had previously been in out-of-home care. CWS trajectories leading up to CSE identification did not differ significantly by CSE confirmation; however, racial disproportionality was observed in the identification of confirmed CSE victimization. Specifically, Black children were at higher estimated odds of having victimization documented relative to Hispanic youth. After controlling for child and initial CPS report characteristics, the CWS intervened later in childhood for youth that went on to have CSE risk or victimization identified in their case records. Those with identified victimization spent less of their overall lifetime in CWS-supervised cases, but experienced more placement moves and had more entries into medical, psychiatric and/or correctional facilities. Across Los Angeles County, the estimated odds of exploitation being reported to CPS were positively associated with neighborhood concentrated disadvantage. To date, this study represents the most rigorous population-level analysis of child welfare involvement prior to CSEC, and has several key implications for practice and policy. Results show that a majority of children had a history of CSW involvement but were no longer under CWS jurisdiction at the time CSE was identified. This exposes an ongoing need for CSEC-specialized interventions that explicitly include family participation. In addition, CWS decisions not to investigate, intervene or continue providing formal services and supervision appear to have long-term consequences related to CSE victimization, and may indicate that that families’ underlying needs went unmet during their initial contact with the CWS. Findings from this analysis identify racial disproportionality in CSE identification within a statewide predominantly non-White child population, and expose a need to test for differences in CSE screening and investigative practices by first responders within different cultural contexts. Finally, this analysis documents a relationship between neighborhood-level concentrated disadvantage and CSEC, and in doing so draws attention to child and family-level resource scarcity as drivers of CSEC. Youth and parent social and economic motivators have been largely absent from discourse on CSE in child welfare scholarship, but this analysis suggests that addressing social, material and economic resource scarcity may optimize CSEC prevention efforts.

Advisor: Duerr Berrick, Jill