EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Anaiah Walker was 15 when she went missing from Arizona’s foster care system in December 2019. Five months later, her body – shoeless and disfigured – was found discarded on the median of a freeway. It took the police 12 days to identify the child. Anaiah was one of the estimated 20,000 children who go missing from the child protection system every year. State agencies weren’t required to report missing foster children to law enforcement until 2014. Since then, reports of children missing from care have more than doubled. Protocols and best practices for the search and recovery of missing foster children are scarce, and laws outlining search requirements are virtually nonexistent. Traffickers know that children without stable families are easy prey. Research overwhelmingly shows that most sexually trafficked children are from foster care. Some children, like Anaiah, are found dead. Some are never found.