Child Trafficking, Confidential Police Informants, and Child Welfare
How do you call CPS on CPS?
A little over a year ago I testified against my trafficker/dad/rapist because child welfare made him a foster parent.
I could hear my neighbors bickering about Thanksgiving recipes as I called the child abuse hotline to let them know they had made a mistake. A grouchy social worker who did not want to be working on a holiday during a pandemic answered.
I told her that CPS had investigated my dad for child abuse when I was 8 years old, and that they should have the file from when I was a child, along with police and medical reports. I told her that my dad is a confidential police informant, so his criminal background check might not include all of his violent offenses, but that he has at least one felony and many restraining orders. When I hung up, my body could not stop shaking and I vomited every time I tried to eat. I accidentally set a turkey on fire and cried some more.
When I called back, nothing had changed. The caseworker asked for evidence of the abuse I survived as a child. In a moment of frustrated desperation, I told her that my body was the evidence. No kindergarten teachers told me I was responsible for documenting my parents’ abuse, like when my dad threw me against the wall, left me with pedophiles, or locked me in a cinderblock room alone for days. I never called the police on my parents in grade school, because what child does that?
I sent a complaint to the ombudsman, who informed me they had purged the file years ago that documented my parents’ abuse, along with police and medical records. I noted my dad’s criminal record, but because he is a confidential police informant, most of his recent charges had been dismissed, and therefore didn’t matter to the social workers and child welfare investigators.
Researching my dad’s criminal history and aliases took a toll. Hives bloomed across my body and my hands bled from dyshidrotic eczema, or “stress stigmata'' as my formerly Catholic nurse friend jokingly called it. Every night I had nightmares of my father murdering me in retaliation when I managed to sleep at all.
It took five months to find a lawyer to file a motion to intervene. I charged over $10,000 in legal fees and related costs to maxed out credit cards, and we drained our savings. We moved to a safer location.
I drove to a county far away to have my affidavit notarized, playing Britney Spears on repeat on the stereo. I figured that if anyone could understand legal battles with an abusive, controlling father, it’s Britney. As I sang along to “Toxic” and “Everytime,” it felt strangely cathartic to have all the worst things in my life documented in the organized legal file sitting beside me. Like a road trip with my childhood trauma sitting shotgun.
In a daze, I stared at the brick wall of a small town’s bank where Kurt Cobain grew up. There was no going back. I had to do for this infant what no adult had done for me when I was a child. Protecting someone I didn’t know felt like the sole reason I had survived. I walked into the bank with the affidavit and hoped that my dad would not stalk the tellers after it was filed.
Navigating child welfare and the legal system felt impossible. And yet, I was lucky. I thought of how much harder this would be without my intersections of privilege––I am a white English-speaking citizen who did not fear the risk of deportation. I also had access to credit cards that allowed me to help a child I had never met. I wished I could do the same for every child incarcerated by ICE and Homeland Security, but I only had so many credit cards, and in this case, I personally knew how dangerous the man that child welfare had made a foster parent was.
When the court date was set, I was not allowed to testify remotely. The airport TSA agent placed her hand on my bra’s underwire and I sobbed uncontrollably, my facemask wet with tears. The TSA agent looked terrified but I couldn’t stop crying.
All the hotels near the courthouse advertised their resident Wild West ghosts. But I cared more about air conditioning than a ghost sighting. We checked into a hotel where Frank Sinatra, Greta Garbo, and Evel Knievel once stayed, and I fell asleep watching Ghostbusters on a local channel. We saw no ghosts. Or at least not the ones the hotel advertised.
The next day at the courthouse, I took four steps, tripped and fell. When I made it inside, a security guard asked if I was ok. “I don’t know,” I said, not realizing that he was referring to my bleeding knee.
Because of confidentiality laws for court cases involving minors, I cannot divulge details from the hearing without being held in contempt of court and risk being arrested.
What I can say is that I held a pen in my fist throughout the hearing. I kept it ready in case my dad tried to kill me before the bailiff could intervene. From past experiences, I knew he’d probably go for my neck first.
What I can say is that during a court recess, one of the other lawyers didn’t know I was within earshot. She laughed to her colleague and said “What an actress” after I had cried so hard answering her questions that I thought my eyes might blister.
What I can say is that my trafficker being allowed to foster an infant illustrates how corrupt our police systems are, and how violently corrupt, negligent, and incompetent child welfare is. Child welfare needs to be completely overhauled and funded better. Because if you do not pay social workers enough, you will inevitably attract candidates for the wrong reasons –– predators who won’t care that the pay is low because they aren’t looking for monetary compensation, they are looking for unmitigated access to abuse the most vulnerable populations. Police, border patrol, and law enforcement receive most funding to combat human trafficking. But even if police help a victim of child trafficking, those officers don’t take the kid home, make them dinner, and read bedtime stories. Police investigations and interactions with trafficking survivors is a miniscule fraction of the time that social workers, healthcare providers, therapists, housing advocates, and others that the child will need in years to come. Yet most police salaries are paid at least twice as much as social workers. The math is all wrong.
As a child in the 90s, I was lucky to be trafficked before Roe v. Wade was overturned and abortion was banned in my home state without any exceptions for assaulted children, rape, or incest. I was lucky to have survived at all. Being alive makes me an outlier. Because escaping your trafficker is rarely the hardest part. If your trafficker doesn’t kill you, the disabilities trafficking leaves you with makes being alive exponentially more expensive. If your trafficker doesn’t kill you, you spend your existence searching for everything that has been taken from you.
After the hearing, I went back to the hotel to check out. I didn’t want to be murdered by my dad and become another ghostly tourist attraction the hotel advertised to guests. I tried to distract myself as the hotel manager typed on her computer. We chatted about her horses and what time of year the cactus bloom during climate change. I wanted desperately to appear like a normal person, not someone masking a panic attack, not the daughter of a violent human trafficker and organized crime boss who wants to kill her. I tapped my foot on the terracotta tile. I imagined Frank Sinatra’s voice echoing across the lobby, Greta Garbo’s gown as she descended the staircase, Evil Knievel donning his cape as he headed to another gig where he’d defy death for a paying audience. Nice work if you can survive it.
The desert sun was setting as I drove hours to a safer hotel closer to the airport. My body tensed when a white truck roared down the highway. Men in white trucks scare me and I worried it might be my dad hunting me. The radio played French country music ballads and the sky burned a fiery pink, casting the undulating hills in a beautifully stark black contrast. This is where I rode my horse when I ran away from home to live in a palo verde tree –– which is really more of a cactus than a tree. I began running away as a toddler, so my parents bought a leash. Still, I ran away nearly every year. The year I started my period, I was 9 years old and tried to ride my horse 500 miles to the ocean. But I didn’t make it because my horse, Flash, was too afraid of crossing freeways.
The sky darkened as I drove through New River, the town where I grew up. The place where I nearly died so many times as a kid. I felt grateful to be alive, in spite of all the lifelong health issues and disabilities I struggle to live with because I physically survived four traffickers. Because I lived, I was able to protect one child. That alone has justified all the pain, violence, and expensive therapy over the decades. As I passed the boarded up ghost town gas station of Jackass Acres and its jungle gym rocket ship where Mr. Acres used to yell at kids, I felt relieved I never had to come back here again.