States fail to track abuses in foster care facilities housing thousands of children, US says

WASHINGTON (AP) — Many states are failing to track how frequently children in foster care facilities are abused, sexually assaulted or improperly restrained, leaving them vulnerable to mistreatment, the U.S. Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General said in a report Wednesday.

The findings come just two weeks after a Senate committee investigation revealed children are subjected to abuse in foster care facilities around the country that are operated by a handful of large, for-profit companies and financed by taxpayers.

States that are responsible for the nearly 50,000 children in these facilities are not doing enough to piece together which facilities or companies are problematic, according to the latest federal report.

More than a dozen states don’t track when multiple abuses happen at a single facility or across facilities owned by the same company, the HHS OIG report found.

“We found that many states did not have the information they would need to identify patterns of maltreatment in residential facilities,” the report said.

States are also not consistently sharing information about abuse, even when it occurs at facilities owned by companies that operate across the country.

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