For the Sake of Black Girls (Who Deserve Care, Too)

photo of Alex Miller at the 2024 Conference for National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

After co-authoring a report with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) on children missing from foster care, Alex Miller (Deputy Director for Multisystem Operations) and Macon Stewart (Senior Deputy Director) were invited to present at the 2024 National Missing and Unidentified Persons Conference in Las Vegas, NV in April.

Macon and Alex’s session, titled For the Sake of Black Girls (Who Deserve Care, Too), elucidated the often unacknowledged connections between Black girls going missing from the child welfare system and factors like racism, media bias, and juvenile legal system involvement. Miller and Stewart highlighted ways that systems often perpetuate harms against Black girls, the short- and long-term consequences of those harms, and how individuals affiliated with law enforcement, education, child welfare, and youth justice entities can uplift and serve Black girls and other opportunity populations to diminish cycles of harm.

For further reading, you can find the report with the National Center for Missing and Exploiting Children (NCMEC) below:

image of a report cover, to click on to read the full report.

You can find the op-ed co-authored by Alex Miller and Macon Stewart below:

Opinion: Bring Back Black Girls Before They’re Herded Into Foster Care, Justice System