Stop criminalizing victims of sex trafficking
For most kids, daily activities include attending school or spending time with friends. Not for Alana. Like too many child sex trafficking victims, the only daily guarantee in Alana’s life was that she would be raped by her trafficker and buyers who paid to engage in sexual acts with her.
When the police discovered Alana’s abuse, she was not immediately taken to a safe place. Instead, Alana was arrested 10 times for “prostitution” between ages 13 and 18. She recounts being pulled from hotel rooms by police, handcuffed and placed in the back of a police car with her hands bound behind her back.
Arriving at juvenile hall, she remembers undergoing full-body searches, fingerprinting and dehumanizing comments about being a “prostitute.” She spent countless nights on a flimsy mattress in a concrete cell.
Countless children are like Alana, manipulated by adults who buy and sell their bodies. Too often they are arrested and sent to juvenile hall. Federal law unequivocally states that any minor who engages in a sexual act in exchange for anything of value — whether money, food or shelter — is a victim of child sex trafficking. Yet California still criminalizes these children.
Other states, by contrast, proclaim there is “no such thing as a child prostitute” and recognize these children as victims of abuse deserving of supportive services outside of the criminal justice system.
Fourteen states and Washington, D.C. no longer allow children to be arrested for prostitution. Here in California, the Los Angeles County Sheriff joined Rights4Girls’ “No Such Thing” campaign and directed his department to stop arresting victims of child sex trafficking.
This progress is commendable, but we must go further. Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) is fighting for SB 1322, which precludes victims of child abuse from being arrested and charged with prostitution and related loitering. SB 1322 recognizes the harmful effects of arresting victims of child sex trafficking, including further traumatization, disruption in education, disconnection from the community, vulnerability to sexual violence and stigmatization, all of which create barriers to future success.
But arresting trafficking victims creates another harm: It impedes children’s ability to trust adults who are acting in their best interest.
Withelma “T” Ortiz Walker Pettigrew, an internationally-recognized advocate and trafficking survivor stated, “When service providers came wanting to help, I didn’t believe them. Being arrested proved my exploiters were right — that in the eyes of the rest of the world, I was a ‘prostitute’ and a ‘criminal.’”
In the words of another young survivor, “being locked up made us feel like animals. It made us feel abandoned, used, unheard, and misunderstood.”
Opponents of SB 1322 argue that taking away law enforcement’s ability to arrest exposes children to more violence and danger. We agree. Simply “not arresting” is insufficient.
Fortunately, California law was clarified in 2014 to recognize that victims of trafficking are victims of abuse. The legislature provided funding for counties to develop innovative interagency strategies to identify and serve these children through the child welfare system.
Now an adult, Alana works with other child victims who, like her, continue to be arrested simply for being victims of sexual violence. She is adamant that this practice must stop.
In the words of Rights4Girls Executive Director Yasmin Vafa, “this is the only form of child abuse for which we criminalize the victim.”
Kate Walker Brown is a staff attorney and lead of the Child Trafficking Team at the National Center for Youth Law in Oakland. Maheen Kaleem is an Equal Justice Works Fellow/staff attorney at Rights4Girls in Washington, D.C., and a former service provider for sexually exploited youth in Oakland. They wrote this for the Mercury News.