Last Updated on August 16, 2022
A Texas CPS worker was caught in a video obtained by a local FOX station telling a 14-year-old girl at a foster care facility that she would have to engage in prostitution if she wanted to be given something to eat. The underage girl recorded the footage herself after informing her mother that CPS staff had repeatedly encouraged her to engage in prostitution.
The girl’s mother, Keisha Bazley, told local Texas media that she has nine children and had originally turned to CPS for help with her 14-year-old daughter, who was experiencing behavioral issues. Ultimately, the girl was placed in the troubled Texas foster care system and was housed in a hotel in Harris County as she awaited placement in a foster home.
After reporting to her mother that CPS staff had repeatedly encouraged her to engage in prostitution, she filmed a CPS worker telling her that if she wanted to eat, she would have to prostitute herself.
“You gonna be a hoe, be a real hoe,” the CPS worker says in the video.
“The worker had been, in fact, telling her ‘this is how you can make money. You need to do this. I used to do this, and you can do the same thing,’” mother Keisha Bazley told FOX26.
“When I saw the video with the lady, it’s like my soul left my body,” Bazley said.
Bazley filed a formal complaint with the state, prompting the head of CPS to drive all the way from Austin to Houston to “apologize” to her face-to-face. According to the FOX26 profile of her situation, she is fighting the state’s seizing of her daughter, who has now been placed in a foster home. The court custody case is ongoing.
Cases of child sex trafficking and abuse have been rampant in the Texas foster care system.
According to court-appointed watchdogs, “a quarter of children who DFPS identified as victims of sexual abuse were victimized or revictimized after entering foster care” in the State of Texas.
Earlier this year, multiple employees of a state-contracted foster care facility for female survivors of child sex trafficking were accused of the further trafficking of the young girls in their care. While the state ordered the facility, which called itself “The Refuge,” to shut down, Texas CPS has been accused of burying multiple prior investigations into the alleged Refuge trafficking ring.
In addition to allegations of physical and sexual abuse, employees of “The Refuge” allegedly sold nude photographs of children in their care in exchange for drugs.
The CPS sex trafficking and abuse cases in Texas are far from isolated. All over the United States, Child Protective Services and similarly-named government organizations have been accused of being complicit and even playing an active role in the trafficking of children.