Foster Care Training

This training will provide relevant information about commercial sexual exploitation and how to support vulnerable foster youth/families. Child sexual exploitation is a major child protection issue for communities across the country. Hidden from view and often unnoticed, vulnerable young girls and boys are recruited, groomed and then abused, leaving them traumatized and without support. Issues specific to sexual exploitation of youth, including the difficulty in identifying youth at risk, can make the provision of appropriate treatment and services a challenge for systems that serve the youth. This training will address the importance of early identification and will present the Commercially Sexually Exploited Identification Tool (CSE-IT) as a method of screening and identifying of commercially sexually exploited youth. The structure and philosophy of the CSE-IT will be discussed. A framework for engaging with sexually exploited youth will be presented along with suggestions for talking with youth. Finally, instructions for using the CSE-IT and related data collection will be reviewed.