Missouri Courts Employed a Child Sex Trafficker for Decades
The President of the Missouri Juvenile Officers Association was just convicted of child sex trafficking - and the state government hasn't say a word
Meet St. Louis native Scott Burow, Federal Inmate #02159-510, former President of the Missouri Juvenile Officers Association, and child sex trafficker. Scott, age 63, was just sentenced to seven years in prison for transporting a minor across state lines. Scott was a high-ranking employee of the Missouri court system for years, in charge of the fate of children.
St. Louis news has not much covered the case. The Missouri Bar hasn’t said too much, if anything. The various family court attorneys arguing against any sort of reform have no statement on the matter.
Missouri is the only state in America where the judicial branch of government can bring itself cases. The only exception to this universal prohibition of jurisprudence is around the custody and care of children. Missouri has a unique form of state employee, the juvenile officer. In the Missouri system, the juvenile officer is an judicial (though sometimes police department) employee who can bring cases about citizens of minor age on behalf of the court, as opposed to on behalf of a party, such as a prosecutor or state agency or private citizen.
This bizarre design has already caught the attention of the legal profession. Missouri Law Review published Where the Judiciary Prosecutes in Front of Itself: Missouri's Unconstitutional Juvenile Court Structure by Josh Gupta-Kagan, which called out the fact that none of it makes sense.
The U.S. Department of Justice went a step further and analyzed the St. Louis County Family Court and found its conduct in systematic violation of certain rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
In September 2021, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a report showing that Missouri loses track of around 1,000 foster children per year, many of whom are at risk of being sex trafficked.
About a week after the report was issued, I delivered testimony before the Missouri Legislature asking them to address the failure of police to investigate missing children, and the failure to even write down when children go missing.
A couple weeks later, the records building of the Children’s Division, which houses foster care records, burned to the ground in a total loss. There was no investigation that determined the cause of the fire.
Six months later, it was revealed that one needn’t look for shadowy members of organized crime to wonder who was trafficking kids using the juvenile court system. One of the highest-ranking guys running juvenile welfare in Missouri was trafficking kids and producing child sex abuse media himself.
In his Sentencing Memorandum to the Federal District Court, Burow asserted that he had the full support of judges, state agencies, and prosecuting attorneys—even after his son was prosecuted for producing child sex abuse media. (Ian Burow is incarcerated at Federal Correctional Institution Marianna until 2030.)
Burow also asserted that depression over the COVID-19 pandemic led him to traffic a child across state lines to produce sex abuse media.
The only politician I have seen comment on these atrocities is Rep. Sarah Unsicker, who is running for Attorney General of Missouri.
This is a state where the courts are allowed to prosecute their own cases while violating the U.S. Constitution and where its employees can personally engage in sex trafficking of children without as much as a negative comment from Democrats or Republicans.
That will not be permitted much longer. The reckoning is already under way.