Sacramento liberals shouldn’t block harsher punishments for buyers of child sex | Opinion

Last year, with much work and a late-breaking assist by Gov. Gavin Newsom, state Sen. Shannon Grove managed to toughen up penalties for those who engage in sex trafficking of children.

Grove’s Senate Bill 14 moved the crime of selling minors for sex into the category of a serious felony. As such, it now qualifies as a third strike and more imprisonment.

But that bill, backed by The Bee Editorial Board as necessary, only addressed the seller side of the equation. At a Sacramento news conference streamed online Thursday, the Bakersfield Republican, whose 12th District includes Clovis and much of Fresno, joined two colleagues to announce a new bill, SB 1414, that will impose stricter penalties on the buyers of child sex.

In the same way that SB 14 increased the punishment for trafficking, SB 1414 will ramp up penalties on anyone buying sex from minors.

“We have to address the demand side,” Grove said. “We have to go after the buyers.”

She added that “there is no such thing as a child receiving money from a grown adult and saying it was consensual sex.”

Under the proposed bill, anyone convicted of purchasing sex from a child will face a prison term of two to four years and a fine up to $25,000.

Co-authors of SB 1414 are Democrat Sens. Anna Caballero of Merced and Susan Rubio of Baldwin Park. They also co-authored SB 14 last year.

Widespread trafficking

Rubio, a former elementary school teacher, told reporters that California leads the nation in human trafficking. Most of that is for sex, though some labor trafficking happens as well. She said the state had 500 arrests last month for alleged human trafficking.

Caballero said perpetrators “trick” children into thinking they are on their side.

“We need to protect them (children). We need to do everything possible to let them know we are on their side.”

Tyson McCoy, a deputy district attorney in Santa Barbara County, said men who pay to have sex with children now face a misdemeanor, which means serving a maximum of six months in a county jail. With good-behavior credits, most defendants are in jail only half that time, McCoy said.

“We need tools as prosecutors to go after these people who sexually and physically exploit our most vulnerable population, our children,” he said.

Sacramento State’s Institute for Social Research in 2022 found that 13,000 people were victims of sex trafficking in Sacramento County from 2015 to 2020 — more than 11 times the number identified by law enforcement and service providers. The Public Policy Institute of California notes that sex trafficking makes up most of the human trafficking cases in the state and that the overwhelming majority of victims identify as female.

According to Saved In America, a San Diego-based group that helps locate runaways and missing children, a pimp can earn nearly $400,000 a year. Nationally, sex trafficking is the second-largest underground industry, only behind drug trafficking. Sex trafficking generates an estimated $99 billion in revenues a year.

Overcome opposition

Last year, when Grove’s first bill was heard in the Legislature, Democrats on the Assembly Public Safety Committee opposed it because of how it increased incarceration.

It took the involvement of Newsom and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas to get the committee to reconsider its initial vote. On a second try, SB 14 was approved by the committee.

A deputy public defender in San Francisco told the Los Angeles Times that his office will likely oppose the new measure. “In general my office is opposed to policies that go back to the 1990s and the old carceral policies,” said Matt SotoRosen.

It is a legal flaw that someone who pays to have sex with a minor only faces misdemeanor penalties. We don’t we agree with SotoRosen that increasing punishments for those who buy child sex takes California back to the 1990s. That’s a specious argument used too often and dismisses the bipartisan support in the Legislature to protect children and to address California’s epidemic of human trafficking.

San Joaquin Valley legislators like Democrats Joaquin Arambula and Esmeralda Soria and Republican Devon Mathis must get behind Grove’s bipartisan bill and push to see it become law.

Given last year’s experience, Grove, Caballero and Rubio know their opposition well. They will make a forceful effort to get SB 1414 approved.

Grove is right: No child can rightly consent to have an adult pay for sex. California should stamp out such abuse, and SB 1414 will help.