Earlier this year, California made a long-overdue change in the law. Minors who are too young to legally consent to sex can no longer be arrested for prostitution. Instead, the children are treated as sexual abuse victims, just like they would if money hadn’t changed hands.
As a longtime CPS worker, I’ve worked with exploited kids, so this issue’s personal to me. Regardless of one’s views on legalizing/decriminalizing prostitution, trafficking victims deserve a safe harbor, not a jail cell. The pimp still goes to jail. The customer still goes to jail. Police are still allowed to intervene in child trafficking, just like they are with any other form of child abuse.
The Washington Examiner ran a headline claiming that California “legalized child prostitution.” (I don’t like to link to clickbait — it’s easy to find if you want to.) This false claim has been all over social media for the last couple of days. Snopes has been trying to set the record straight.
Watching the story bounce around on social media has been a bit surreal. Even after having it clearly explained what the law does and doesn’t do, people kept insisting that the change creates an “incentive” for pimps to target kids. In fact, the opposite is true. Previously, a trafficking victim had every reason to be afraid to seek help, knowing that she (or he) would be arrested along with the pimp and johns.
I even saw it argued that trafficking victims should be arrested as “leverage” to get them to testify against the pimps. By that logic, we should arrest all child abuse victims, not just trafficking. Hell, let’s just arrest all victims of any crime!
It’s hard to know how many of the retweets and whatnot were from people who were genuinely misinformed, and how many were cynically using the issue to deliberately spread fake news. Special shout out to this tweet for fake news buzzword bingo:
California Democrats legalized child Prostitution TO Accomdate ISLAM ! SICK DISGUSTING ! WAIT THEY SUPPORT KILLING BABIES FOUNDERS OF KKK
I’ll go back to trying to reason with people (though not that particular one) after I finish banging my head on my desk.