The lawmaker admitted he didn’t have concrete proof yet.
QUICK FACTS:
- David Farnsworth, a Republican state senator from Arizona, stated he believes the Arizona Department of Child Safety is aiding the international sex trafficking of children from Arizona.
- The senator cited the loss of more than 550 children last year by the Arizona Department of Child Safety, saying that about half were listed as runaways or “otherwise missing.”
- Farnsworth said he’s concerned the children were abducted and sold into a sex trafficking ring and that he has been holding meetings with the Department of Child Services.
- “When I first heard about this, I believed that children from Arizona (DCS) were ending up in sex trafficking. Now, after the research I’ve done, I’m confident of it,” he told reporters. “But I can’t prove it.”
OTHER STATE SENATORS INVESTIGATING:
- Farnsworth alleged that two former Republican state senators from other states lost their lives within days of one another earlier this year because of investigations into similar issues.
- In June of 2019, Arkansas investigated the shooting of former Republican state Sen. Linda Collins-Smith as a potential homicide.
- Around the same time, former state Sen. Jonathan Nichols was found dead of a gunshot wound in his home of Norman, about 20 miles from Oklahoma City.
BACKGROUND:
- Reports of potential abuse of the child protective service system are not new, and in early 2018, Newsweek asked the question, “We Have Set Up a System to Sex Traffic American Children?”
- In the article the other stated, “Most people don’t know about our nation’s foster care to sex trafficking pipeline, but the facts are sobering. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) found that “of the more than 18,500 endangered runaways reported to NCMEC in 2016, one in six were likely victims of child sex trafficking. Of those, 86 percent were in the care of social services when they went missing.”
