Sexual assault survivors stress protection for foster youths

“There have been so many proposals that have been different standards where you have to produce old records, which are particularly burdensome for our young people who don’t have control over those records,” Jennifer Rodriguez, executive director of the Youth Law Center, told The Center Square. “Government systems have set lengths of time under which they destroy records, or they say it’s not really in their interest to provide records that might lead to liability for them.”

The proposals groups like the Youth Law Center are fighting against, Rodriguez said, are being pushed as universal reforms without considering the implications for children in the foster and juvenile justice system and the adults who used to be kids in those systems.

“It sounds like such a narrow population, but the need for reform is being driven by massive settlements that came from incredibly terrible harm,” Rodriguez said.

According to multiple news reports, settlements as large as $4 billion have been approved by local and state agencies up and down California between former foster youth and government agencies tasked with overseeing the welfare of children. In 2025, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved such a settlement that claimed roughly 7,000 instances of sexual abuse occurred in county-run facilities since 1959.

That followed a different San Jose-area settlement between the Giarretto Institute and a former foster child who was sexually abused in a foster home he was placed in by the company, according to a 2010 article by The Daily Journal. The former foster youth was awarded $30 million.

“This is a government program that’s supposed to be about making endangered children, one way or another, safer,” Ed Howard, senior counsel for the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law, told The Center Square after the press conference. “And in too many instances, it’s making it worse. The answer to the failures of the government is not to let it off financially.”

While there are costs to local and state government agencies tasked with caring for children in foster care and the juvenile justice system, some of the heaviest costs aren’t monetary, advocates on Thursday said, but social.

Californians should know those costs, Rodriguez said.

“I want taxpayers to know that these are children who are depending on them to basically hold systems accountable,” Rodriguez told The Center Square. “That’s their tax dollars that are stepping in to raise children. At the end of the day, the public should really be feeling like these are all our children, they’re being paid for with our dollars, and they deserve to be having good lives and getting quality care.”