Selling Kids: Examples of the Horrors of Modern Amorality

Written by Goel
August 25, 2026

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated 4,000 convictions involving over 2,300 children after it was revealed that two Luzerne County judges, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, had accepted over $2.8 million in bribes to jail children at for-profit private prisons. Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years in prison; Conahan received 17.5 years in federal prison and his sentence was commuted by President Joe Biden in December 2024.

Children are a commodity, and have been throughout history.

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In the less developed parts of the world, they still are. In Afghanistan, young girls are routinely sold into child marriage by families to settle debts.

Misconduct involving children is not limited to the Third World. In the United States, such malfeasance has been industrialized. In Illinois, Shauntele Y. Pridgeon and 14 others were indicted in 2023 for a six year wire fraud scheme in which they approved fake childcare providers who received state funds for foster care services. The 15 defendants collectively received $3.2 million. Pridgeon received $1.6 million in kickbacks from her fellow defendants.

35 Illinois DCFS employees were disciplined over five years for lying, falsifying information, and perjury. The Better Government Association found that hundreds of foster children in Illinois were held after doctors cleared them for release. The foster children were held in detention centers, shelters, and psychiatric hospitals, and one judge had cited Illinois DCFS director Marc Smith 11 times for contempt over his failure to appear and testify about the issue.

In California, four defendants, Mohamed Muriidi Mohamed, Amina Abdirazak Omar, Osob Abdirazak Omar, and Omar Omar, were charged over their involvement in a childcare benefits fraud scheme. The defendants falsely claimed that parents were working at or attending the UMI Learning Center, which entitled the parents’ children to state funded childcare. The defendants submitted false verification forms to the the Department of Health and Human Services, and the parents participating the scheme were expected to pay UMI $200 and split the program funds with the defendants.

The total costs of the scheme was over $3.7 million.

In New Jersey, Lamont King was charged with seven felony counts after he used his position with DCFS to coerce two women who had lost custody of their children into sex.

In Florida, three men, Antonio Michel, Jaime Figueroa, and Raymond Jean, were convicted of sex trafficking foster children after they forced them into child prostitution. The Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector found that five states did not screen foster children for sex trafficking once they were returned to foster care after running away. 100,000 children are trafficked for sex in the United States alone every year, with the majority of those victims currently or formerly housed in the foster care system. Some 60% of child sex trafficking victims have a history within the child welfare system.

In Kentucky, an investigation found that 304 foster children were housed in state office buildings, hotels, and parks, which exposed them to risks including sex trafficking and physical abuse. In New York, Kareem and Sharice Mitchell sex trafficked at least eight victims. Sharice Mitchell was a certified New York State foster parent; her husband Kareem was a registered sex offender with a prior conviction for transporting a minor for prostitution.

In St. Louis, Missouri attorney Matthew R. Grant filed a RICO civil suit alleging that multiple court and DCFS officials used the threat of reduction or loss of custody against parents who refused to pay exorbitant fees.

In Texas, a Harris County district judge resigned in 2014 after it was revealed that cases were backdated and dismissed for failure to prosecute, which forced families to pay a second time to be heard. Judge Denise Pratt failed to issue rulings and orders in a timely manner, and backdated or dismissed cases to cover up her malfeasance. A grand jury declined to indict Pratt, which was highly unusual given that Texas grand juries issue indictments in over 99.9% of presented cases.

In Washington state, Stephanie Maya found herself on the wrong end of guardian ad litem Meredith Gerhart’s report, which falsely asserted that Maya had three prior domestic violence offenses on her record.

Maya had reported her ex-boyfriend on three occasions for domestic violence.

The report, which Maya says includes many other false claims from her ex-boyfriendstated like facts, had a near immediate impact on her custody case. A court commissioner ordered that the child spend weekends with his dad — who, until that point, was only allowed supervised visits — and said the report “clearly establishes” that Maya was causing conflict in the co-parenting relationship, a finding that can lead to restrictions on parenting time. Gerhart, who’s still working as a guardian ad litem in Thurston County, said she cannot comment for this article because the case is active.

It took nearly a year and the help of a lawyer for a court review board to formally reprimand Gerhart for failing to make “any effort” to substantiate the claims of Maya’s ex, who pleaded guilty in February 2026 to assaulting Maya and interfering with her attempt to call 911. It’s a rare instance of a parent successfully proving that an investigation of a guardian ad litem — a neutral third-party court investigator also referred to as a GAL — was unfairly biased, although parents and attorneys say they see biased reports all the time.

In short, between official corruption, incompetence, and bureaucratic ineptitude, children are routinely victimized. In many cases, they are sold by corrupt officials to private detention centers and facilities which then bill taxpayers. In other cases, the children escape an abusive foster placement only to end up as sex trafficking victims. During family court proceedings, guardians ad litem and case workers routinely leverage their extreme power over parents in custody battles to extort enormous fees from both parties, with the party who resists the extortion subject to retaliation.

The general public is unaware of the scale of the issue, as the news reports fail to capture the full extent of these issues. When 61% of the 100,000 children who are sex trafficked each year are foster children, the problem becomes obvious. Kids are being sold, if not directly by corrupt judges and case workers, then indirectly by the opportunistic sex traffickers who take full advantage of the government’s failure to protect the children in its custody.