In Immigrant Children's Shelters, Sexual Assault Cases Are Open and Shut
Over the past six months, ProPublica has gathered hundreds of police reports detailing allegations of sexual assaults in immigrant childrens shelters, which have received $4.5 billion for housing and other services since the surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America in 2014. The reports, obtained through public records requests, revealed a largely hidden side of the shelters one in which both staff and other residents sometimes acted as predators.
Several of the incidents have led to arrests of shelter employees or teenage residents. And in one particularly heinous case, a youth care worker was convicted in September of molesting seven boys over nearly a year at an Arizona shelter. The employee had worked for months without a full background check.
But ProPublicas review of the hundreds of police reports showed something else about the assaults. Something that went beyond background checks. Kids at shelters across the country were, indeed, reporting sexual attacks in the shelters, often by other kids. But again and again, the reports show, the police were quickly and with little investigation closing the cases, often within days, or even hours.
https://www.propublica.org/article/boystown-immigrant-childrens-shelter-sexual-assault