Beginning on Jan. 1, 2017 child prostitution will no longer be treated as a crime in California. Those children caught up in sex trafficking will be treated as victims instead. Police officers in the state will be forbidden to arrest any person under the age of 18 for soliciting or loitering with intent to solicit sex. California governor Jerry Brown signed the bill into law on September 26. The new law requires police to report allegations of child prostitution to county child welfare agencies.
While advocates of the law say it will help child victims of sex trafficking get treatment rather than send them to juvenile hall and tagging them with a rap sheet for life, nevertheless, it creates an opportunity for pimps and others involved to abuse children even more.
Travis Allen, a Republican lawmaker representing the 72nd Assembly District in the California Legislature, warned of the fallout from what he called a “terribly destructive legislation [that] was written and passed by the progressive Democrats who control California’s state government.”
“[T]eenage girls (and boys) in California will soon be free to have sex in exchange for money without fear of arrest or prosecution.” Allen said there would be “immoral” consequences of decriminalizing child prostitution. “Unfortunately, the reality is that the legalization of underage prostitution suffers from the fatal defect endemic to progressive-left policymaking: it ignores experience, common sense and most of all human nature — especially its darker side,” Allen explained. “The unintended but predictable consequence of how the real villains — pimps and other traffickers in human misery — will respond to this new law isn’t difficult to foresee.”
“Pimping and pandering will still be illegal whether it involves running adult women or young girls. But legalizing child prostitution will only incentivize the increased exploitation of underage girls. Immunity from arrest means law enforcement can’t interfere with minors engaging in prostitution — which translates into bigger and better cash flow for the pimps. Simply put, more time on the street and less time in jail means more money for pimps, and more victims for them to exploit.”
Allen argued that when police officers take child prostitutes into custody, it helps young sex-trafficking victims escape their abusers. “Minors involved in prostitution are clearly victims, and allowing our law enforcement officers to pick these minors up and get them away from their pimps and into custody is a dramatically better solution than making it legal for them to sell themselves for sex,” he wrote. “That only deepens their victimization and renders law enforcement powerless to stop the cycle of abuse. SB 1322 is not simply misguided — its consequences are immoral.”
Paul Durenberger, an assistant chief district attorney in Sacramento County said the legislation is similar to “bills that a trafficker would want to write to protect themselves.”
Those that introduced the seven bills related to the protection of victims of child exploitation are certainly well intentioned, but the unintended consequences of the law may well include increasing the problem of child prostitution. The Sacramento Bee noted that a program in Sacramento already relocates sexually exploited children from juvenile hall to treatment programs. Upon completion of the programs, child sex victims are cleared of charges. California is notorious for its child sex trafficking. This law is likely to make it worse.
“Everywhere are seen wrecks of humanity, neglected family altars, broken-up families. There is a strange abandonment of principle, a lowering of the standard of morality; the sins are fast increasing which caused the judgments of God to be poured upon the earth in the Flood and in the destruction of Sodom by fire.” Testimonies for the Church, Vol. 5, page 601
“And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.” Luke 17:26