Texas Foster Care Facility Closes After Linked to Sex Trafficking

The Refuge Ranch (pictured above), a foster care facility specifically designed to house and treat the victims of child sex trafficking, is now closed after authorities discovered that an employee was selling nude photos of an underaged girl in the facility’s care. Moreover, the employee, a woman, was dating a man who claimed to have been the one to have sex-trafficked one of the girls in the photos.

Though an investigation reveals the Refuge Ranch was not directly linked to child sex trafficking, they’re guilty of harboring the employee with the nude photos and coercing the other employees into keeping the secret as well. Furthermore, at least one employee helped one of the two girls from the photos escape.

It’s hard to imagine that a state-regulated agency beholden to the people whose taxes fund their operation, and for the purposes of making the world a better place rather than a worse one, would have the audacity to put their own reputations and paychecks before their duty to the state and the kids regardless.

Rob and Kathleen Raskin are dedicated to ensuring that stories like this are revealed to the rest of us, who, despite being in a different state, want to know when someone hurts society’s most vulnerable people, children without parents. If the 24-hour news cycles ever mentioned these things, we wouldn’t have to.

Stay tuned for more stories like this as they come. You can read the rest of the article here: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/17/texas-foster-care-trafficking/