What happens when children are removed from their families and placed in facilities that are supposed to protect them but end up in even more danger?

A journalist with the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and Louisville Public Media dug through reports of abuse or neglect by children in state custody.

Housed in Louisville's residential care homes, what Jasmine DeMars found is alarming and reveals the state's failing in investigating abuse allegations while turning a deaf ear to the young victims.

Jasmine joined us earlier today to tell us more.

Jasmine, thank you for a few minutes of your time to talk about this extraordinary investigative work.

Unheard.

Louisville foster kids say they were harmed in residential care and few were believed.

That was the headline.

Tell us, first of all, what inspired you to take a deep dive into this issue?

Yeah, absolutely.

So we heard last year in July of 2022 that a young boy who was seven years old had died at Brookline, which is a residential care facility for foster kids in Louisville.

And from there, I just there were so many questions that I had at the time.

You know, the state shut down that facility for a while.

They stopped placing kids there.

They eventually revoked that facility's license to operate the type of unit that this little boy was living in.

But there were still so many questions for me and for folks in my newsroom.

We wanted to understand why Jason Terry, that was his name, why he needed to be placed in a restaurant in the first place.

We wanted to understand whether things like this were happening at other foster care facilities.

We also wanted to understand how the state was regulating these facilities and making sure that they were being held accountable when children were harmed in their care.

Because in Jason's case, he was placed in a physical hold for several minutes and he lost consciousness and died.

And so we requested records from the state.

And I received hundreds of pages of these investigations into facilities in Louisville.

And what we found is that most of the cases that the state looks at are not.

They don't substantiate them, meaning most of them they don't have enough evidence to confirm whether or not something happened to the child.

And in most of these cases, what we were seeing is that it was coming down to something very simple, which is that it was a staff members word versus a child's word.

And so there wasn't any in a lot of these cases, there wasn't any video evidence.

There wasn't another person corroborating what the child said happened to them.

And in almost all of those cases, the state was ruling against the child.

And that's significant for a lot of reasons, because because it shows us that the state is not you know, when there's not evidence, the child's sort of perspective of what happened is not being weighed the same as the staff member or the adult in the situation.

But we also found is that the state oftentimes isn't even bothering to talk to the child when they say something happens to them.

A lot of the time they go when they open a case, they talk to the staff member who is involved in the situation.

They review any available evidence, if there is any.

They look at the child's history and then they close the case as unsubstantiated.

And we know that we've we talked to experts who said that kids do not often lie about experiencing abuse.

So we know that there's a significant disparity there.

What have those in the social services industry said about what should be done?

Yeah, I have not had a conversation with Secretary Friedlander, who is the leader of the cabinet for Health and Family Services.

I haven't had the chance to speak with him on this yet, but he has told other people, he's told advocates within our community that they certainly will be looking into the issue of kids not being interviewed.

I think that needs to be the first and most important step is just simply ensuring that kids are having the opportunity to to talk about what they said happened to them and giving them the ability to to to talk, to talk about their feelings about a situation.

I think that's step number one.

I've also spoken to other people, not necessarily within the child welfare cabinet, but folks within the legislature and an advocates who say that we really need to make sure that the state is moving to toward a more independent investigative process, because also in the in the process of doing this, this story, we sort of found that these investigations are really not they're really not very independent.

And there are a lot of conflicts of interest involved.

You know, when the state is placing a child in one of these facilities, they they are creating a relationship with those facilities.

They contract with these facilities.

They really need them.

They rely on them a whole lot to ensure that kids have a place to be.

And that creates this sort of incentive, whether intentional or not, to maybe not thoroughly investigate abuse.

Well, Jasmine, thank you so much.

Not just for your time today, but for your excellent reporting.

And we look forward to more.

Thank you for telling this story.

Thank you so much.