From the streets to the statehouse, sex trafficking defies simple solutions

With January designated as National Human Trafficking Prevention Month, Capitol Weekly is examining a little-understood plague on our society – sex trafficking. Over the course of a few stories this month, we’ll explore the nuances of this horrific crime, its cultural influences and possible reform options. Today, we’ll start by examining the discourse over one of last year’s most controversial bills, SB 14, authored by Republican Sen. Shannon Grove.

For the first time in more than two decades, the new year added a new crime to California’s three-strikes law with the January 1, 2024 implementation of Sen. Shannon Grove’s SB 14.

This past summer, the Assembly Public Safety Committee made headlines when it initially blocked the Bakerfield Republican’s proposal to include child sex trafficking on the list of crimes that can automatically put offenders away for life if they commit them and other serious, violent crimes three times.

Critics have long derided the state’s three-strikes-and-you’re-out approach to criminal sentencing as racist and unfair, blaming the policy for inequitably packing California prisons with people of color. For years, progressives in the legislature have shot down Republican and moderate Democrats’ attempts to expand three strikes with little fanfare.

Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer. Photo by AP.

But when all six Democrats on the Assembly Public Safety Committee abstained from voting on SB 14 on July 11^th, seemingly killing the measure, the public outcry was immediate and fierce.

Public Safety Chairman Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, D-Los Angeles, said some Democrats on the committee received death threats after the July 11^th vote.

In a highly unusual move, a day after the vote Gov. Gavin Newsom waded into the legislative debate, calling Grove to tell her he “cares deeply” about the issue and wanted to see what he could do to advance the bill.

Eventually, the committee took up the bill again and passed it, allowing SB 14 to reach the governor’s desk, where it was signed in the fall. By then, the discussion surrounding SB 14 was focused almost entirely on the politics – either Democrats are soft on crime; Republicans aren’t, or Three Strikes is unjust, and doesn’t work.

But lost in the political aspects of the situation were the realities of sex trafficking, a horrifying crime that California lawmakers are almost certain to wrestle with again and again as the problem grows in the Golden State.

Sex trafficking, particularly child sex trafficking, has become a cause célèbre in recent years, thanks to things like the 2023 movie Sound of Freedom. But despite the attention it has received in the media, sex trafficking is often not well understood. That’s especially true of domestic sex trafficking in the United States.

In popular culture, domestic sex trafficking is commonly depicted as involving foreign women who have been brought to America by mysterious foreign men who keep their victims in line with a crew of thugs, like in the 2014 Denzel Washington film The Equalizer. In that film, Washington’s character befriends a teenage girl who is being forced in prostitution by the Russian mafia.

That sort of trafficking does occur in the United States, but that’s hardly the only form of trafficking. Street gangs traffic women and girls. Husbands traffic their wives, mothers traffic their daughters, aunts traffic their nieces in what’s known as familial trafficking.

The discussion surrounding SB 14 was focused almost entirely on the politics – either Democrats are soft on crime; Republicans aren’t, or Three Strikes is unjust and doesn’t work.

And perhaps most visibly in the United States, pimps traffic prostitutes, whether they be adult women or young girls or even boys.

For some people it is hard to conceptualize that pimp-prostitute relationships almost always involve sex trafficking. That confusion is due in part to the fact that sex trafficking laws are relatively new in America while laws against pandering have been on the books for a while.

And pandering, not sex trafficking, is often associated with the pimp-prostitute subculture.

It is also critical to establish that the term prostitute is a controversial one in the anti-trafficking community. Many advocates don’t believe that label is appropriate because most of those who engage in prostitution don’t do so of their own volition.

These advocates believe it’s unfair to call someone a prostitute, preferring instead to use the term “prostituted person.” There’s also those who advocate for the use of the term “sex worker.”

There’s actually quite a vigorous debate over which terms are appropriate to use when talking about sex trafficking. For this story we’ll use the term prostitute solely for the sake of simplicity and clarity.

Many Americans don’t think pimps as depicted in TV shows like HBO’s The Deuce or video games like the Grand Theft Auto series are engaged in sex trafficking or that their prostitutes are victims of sex trafficking.

Instead they think they’re guilty of pandering, which in California is the crime of “encouraging, inducing, or persuading another person to engage in prostitution.” (A separate crime on the books in California is for pimping, which is receiving money from a prostitute.)

Pimps are absolutely guilty of pandering (and pimping), but they’re also guilty of sex trafficking, too. California law defines sex trafficking as doing more than merely encouraging or persuading someone to engage in prostitution. It’s defined as forcing or defrauding or coercing someone into prostitution.

Americans often don’t consider prostitutes to be victims of sex trafficking because they believe prostitutes voluntarily engage in sex work totally free of any negative outside influence. Indeed, there are some who argue that sex work is empowering.

But academic research and the real-life experiences of police, sex trafficking advocates and therapists all point to the fact that the overwhelming majority of women and girls who engage in prostitution do so under the control of a third party – that is, they’re being trafficked.

Americans often don’t consider prostitutes to be victims of sex trafficking because they believe prostitutes voluntarily engage in sex work totally free of any negative outside influence.

In fact, several pimps have written books in which they describe pimping as manipulating women and girls into doing their bidding. In other words, pimps have admitted that a core tenant of what they do is coerce women and girls into prostitution.

That is, by definition, sex trafficking – but Americans frequently don’t see prostitutes as victims because prostitutes are judged as immoral or bad women who have decided on their own to sell themselves.

“It’s a symptom of the larger society,” says Alan Smyth, the executive director of Saving Innocence, a Los Angeles nonprofit that provides crisis response services to child and adult victims of sex trafficking, referring to Americans’ inaccurate perceptions of sex trafficking. “It’s just misunderstood.”

Smyth said educating the public on the realities of sex trafficking is part of what Saving Innocence does, in addition to case management and recovering victims.

So, while Sound of Freedom may have received a lot of attention in 2023, that’s not necessarily what sex trafficking actually looks like in the United States. This matters as we consider what happened with SB 14.

SB 14’s story actually begins in 2022, when Grove introduced SB 1042, which sought to make the sex trafficking or labor trafficking of anyone, child or adult, a third strike. But the bill died in the Senate Public Safety Committee in late April 2022.

Grove says she was told if she wanted to get similar legislation out of committee, she’d have to limit its applicability to victims of a certain age, in part because there were concerns about interfering with legislation to protect adult sex workers from harassment from the criminal justice system.

(A bill analysis also noted that “The current penalty for human trafficking for the purpose of obtaining forced labor or services is imprisonment in state prison for up to 12 years. If the offense involves human trafficking for the purpose of specified sexual conduct, obscene matter or extortion, the punishment proscribed is up to 20 years imprisonment in state prison.”)

Grove told Capitol Weekly that “it broke our hearts” to amend the bill to apply only to child sex trafficking victims, but she said legislators have to operate within the confines of Sacramento’s political realities.

You won’t find any anti-trafficking advocate who doesn’t believe child sex trafficking doesn’t meet the definition of a “violent or serious felony” as defined by three strikes. But many advocates would also argue that the sex trafficking of an adult also qualifies as a violent, serious felony.

Grove said she was “disappointed” that she could not move forward a bill that would help all trafficking victims, but she emphasized that she was pleased to be able to at least help child sex trafficking victims, calling SB 14 a “win,” especially given the struggles it faced in the Assembly.

In an interview with Capitol Weekly, Grove said it is possible she was directed to limit the bill to child sex trafficking victims because legislators didn’t understand the realities of sex trafficking and the pimp-prostitute subculture. But Grove said it is also possible she was asked to restrict the bill for political reasons, and that she simply does not know for sure.

Grove did, however, vow to “continue to fight for victims” of sex trafficking going forward.

For the first five months of 2023, SB 14 sailed through the Senate without a single no vote. On May 25^th, the bill passed out of the Senate and into the Assembly, where two weeks later it was referred to the Assembly Public Safety Committee.

The measure was originally set to be heard by the committee on June 27^th, but at Grove’s request it was delayed until July 11^th, when the Democrats on the panel abstained from voting on the bill.

We know what happened next: the public outcry, the condemnations, the governor’s unusual move to intercede.

As Assemblyman Isaac Bryan, D-Los Angeles, later explained to the Los Angeles Times, the bill was held up as part of a larger debate over expanding the three-strikes law.

“This conversation over SB 14 wasn’t whether child trafficking is serious,” the Times quoted Bryan as saying. “Of course it’s serious.”

But that’s not exactly the full story. ACLU California Action opposed SB 14 on the grounds that the bill “will harm the very people it is supposed to protect by further punishing survivors and deterring other victims from coming forward.”

In an online fact sheet about the bill, ACLU California Action wrote that “Our legal system regularly fails to differentiate between human trafficking victims and their traffickers, who use force, fraud, and coercion to control their victims. Through these systems of violence and control, victims are often forced to commit crimes.”

The ACLU warned that if SB 14 were passed, prosecutors could re-victimize sex trafficking by trying to force them to testify against their pimps or that sex trafficking victims themselves could even be charged with a strike. (To get passed out of the Assembly, SB 14 had to be amended to ensure sex trafficking victims would not be prosecuted under the legislation.)

The ACLU’s position illustrated several reasons that prostitution and trafficking cases can be difficult to prosecute.

The ACLU warned that if SB 14 were passed, prosecutors could re-victimize sex trafficking by trying to force them to testify against their pimps or that sex trafficking victims themselves could even be charged with a strike.

First, it is theoretically possible to convict a sex trafficker on a circumstantial case – that is, a pimp with associations with known prostitutes who lives a lavish lifestyle but has no known means of income.

However, prosecutors are sometimes hesitant to take such circumstantial cases to trial, in part because of jurors’ ignorance about sex trafficking and the pimp-prostitute subculture. Thus, some prosecutors want a sex trafficking victim willing to speaking as a witness before taking a sex trafficking case to court.

“Part of that … is because of juror expectations,” said Courtney Martin, a deputy district attorney in Sacramento County. (Martin said she encourages prosecutors to bring circumstantial cases against pimps, but also noted that witness testimony is critical to prove that a victim was enslaved by a trafficker.)

Martin said when jurors enter the courtroom and are told they’re going to be hearing a sex trafficking case, they expect – in large part because of misrepresentations in the media – that they’re going to be presented with a “victim who is very cooperative with law enforcement.”

But that’s not always the case with sex trafficking victims, whose allegiances are often complicated and twisted by manipulative pimps. In some cases those same pimps have children with their victims, disincentivizing them from testifying against their trafficker.

At the same time, because of the social stigma surrounding prostitutes and the culture of secrecy that infects the pimp-prostitute subculture – and the very real fear of violent retaliation – many sex trafficking victims are uncomfortable with (or terrified of) the idea of testifying against their pimps.

The ACLU’s second concern was that sex trafficking victims could be prosecuted under SB 14. That is because in the pimp-prostitute subculture, prostitutes are not just expected to sell sex for their pimps (and then turn over their earnings). Pimps often expect the women and girls in their stable to rob sex buyers (this is a category of crime known in law enforcement as a “trick roll”) as well as to recruit other women and girls to work for them.

This practice of pimps demanding that their prostitutes recruit other escorts can turn prostitutes into sex traffickers themselves.

Of course, in theory a knowledgeable, discerning prosecutor can see that a prostitute recruited other prostitutes under the threat of violence or brainwashing and rightfully decide not to prosecute a prostitute for sex trafficking. But there is no guarantee that a prosecutor will grasp this dynamic, or sympathize with it even if they do.

There are of course also scenarios in which a woman working as a prostitute for a pimp could genuinely be guilty of sex trafficking and be deserving of criminal prosecution for recruiting other women. Even the staunchest anti-trafficking advocates admit that can happen.

These possible dichotomies are just a few of the reasons why advocates say sex trafficking defies a one-size-fits-all solution.

Said Saving Innocence’s Smyth about the public debate over sex trafficking: “Largely the whole conversation is misunderstood.”

Capitol Weekly reporter Brian Joseph has been researching domestic sex trafficking since early 2017. This fall, his non-fiction book Vegas Concierge: Sex Trafficking, Hip Hop, and Corruption in America will be published by Rowman & Littlefield.