Newsom pushes California to crack down on sex trafficking — fast

SACRAMENTO — California has it. spent millions of dollars to combat sex trafficking, but can still be found hiding in plain sight in every city and town.

Despite all this money and all the resources it buys, whether it’s online, in places like Figueroa Street in Los Angeles or Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento, or even in the hotel rooms where our World Cup guests stay, thousands of women and girls are being sexually exploited in California right now.

“The truth is that few threats to a woman’s safety are as serious. wild “Or it’s as ignored as sex trafficking,” First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom said Monday, sitting with her governor-husband in a small second-floor dance studio built for human trafficking victims.

Siebel Newsom was there to watch Newsom sign an executive order stemming from his work as administrator. advocate for victims of human trafficking. On the face of it, the order may not seem like much, and it’s not likely to make the news. It calls for most major government agencies to work together to develop a plan within 60 days to prevent human trafficking and help survivors.

It’s not an earth-shattering demand. But believe it or not, one of the biggest obstacles our state faces in this age of great technology and constant connectivity is that there is little cooperation among the public fighting traffickers.

Yes we are about 35 people statewide task forces They are working on this issue, sometimes conducting joint operations. But more often, those fighting human trafficking live in their own silos, doing their own thing and often failing or refusing to share even minute details with other jurisdictions.

The same goes for many organizations that work with survivors; Many of these have only emerged in the last few decades, as sex trafficking has transformed from a crime in which children were seen as accomplices to one in which we understand that they are victims.

These organizations often do great work, but often they do it alone. There is no easy way for a survivor or a trafficked girl seeking escape to find someone to help her. This depends largely on luck, the right outreach worker in the right place at the right time, or a police officer who takes the time and care to know what the resources are.

“We are so torn,” Sharmin Bock told the governor. A former prosecutor in Alameda County who tried the first sex trafficking case in the United States. Now he’s advising the first partner on how California can do a better job of combating the predators — both traffickers and buyers — who trade cash for the use of a human body every day.

Bock points out that while those fighting against human trafficking lack cooperation, the opposite is true for criminals. It is organized up and down the state. A trafficker may pick up his victim from one city and take him to another city to meet buyers. Victims are frequently moved to other locations or even sold or traded to other traffickers.

Once a victim crosses the jurisdictional border, everything that happens on the other side is often lost in the wasteland of bureaucracy and red tape. In Bock’s words, when moving from Los Angeles to Riverside, the girl might as well be in Taiwan.

“How do we stop asking whose case is this? How do we solve this case together? How do we solve the problem together?” We need to ask. said Bock. “Cooperation saves children quicker, connects investigations, dismantles trafficking organizations, and holds traffickers accountable. A trafficker should never shirk responsibility because critical information is stored in another agency’s database.”

So while Newsom’s request for a 60-day plan may not seem like much, it gets to the heart of what ails the system.

“Smugglers cooperate every day,” Bock said. “Smugglers have set up networks to exploit children. We must also build stronger networks to protect them.”

Newsom drew a parallel to the plague epidemic retail theft something that fascinated the state not so long ago and which the state is successfully combating. While he was careful to draw the clear line that stealing a tube of toothpaste is far from sexually exploiting a child, he noted similarities: online platforms that turn a blind eye, a lack of coordination between institutions, criminals who know how to exploit systems and not just victims.

Now he is looking for such “momentum” to solve this most stubborn of abuses.

“For the last couple of years, I thought I could buy my way out of this situation,” Newsom said with shocking honesty, pointing to all the money put into the budget. But he said he is now clear that this is not a money issue. This is a public problem.

The governor asked, “How is this possible?” he wondered. He said the executive order was about saying “so much for good intentions…we’re not getting basic results.”

The report at the end of 60 days is not the result. But it’s an acknowledgment that California needs to do better, and a road map to get there.

This is very important. Like Siebel Newsom and the governor, I have two teenage daughters, and I know how vulnerable girls are even in the best of circumstances.

Despite all our resources and good intentions, California cannot continue to let predators win just because they are more organized.