NBC News, Yahoo News – During her roughly four years in West Virginia’s foster care system, Nahomi Bennett says she bounced around among more than a dozen facilities — so many that she lost count. But there is one she can’t forget: the group home where she was living when, she says, an older boy raped her at age 14.
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“I have dreams about it sometimes,” Bennett, now 20, said in an interview. “So I can’t really escape it in a way.”
West Virginia has the country’s highest rate of children in foster care—a figure that’s four times higher than that of the U.S. as a whole. Ravaged by the opioid epidemic, the state has seen its foster care population balloon by 57% over the past decade, overwhelming an already strapped child welfare system.
