Sex trafficking could be reclassified as a violent felony in California under proposed legislation set to be heard next week.
“Everything wrong about California criminal law is laid out in our statutes pertaining to human trafficking: currently, trafficking children for sexual purposes is not considered a violent felony,” Assemblyman Joe Patterson (R-Rocklin) said in a
release Jan. 11, the same day when he introduced the bill. “These perpetrators need to be held accountable and
AB 229 will do just that.”
A hearing is set for March 14 in the Assembly’s Committee on Public Safety, Patterson’s spokeswoman Christina Paxton told The Epoch Times.
The bill aims to make it a violent felony to commit sex trafficking and qualify it as a strike offense under California’s Three Strikes Law, which imposes a state prison term of 25 years to life for those who are convicted of a violent or serious felony after already having two prior convictions for these offenses. Some examples of such crimes include murder, arson, rape, and robbery.
“Tens of thousands of children and adults have been sex trafficked right here in the Sacramento region, including Placer and El Dorado Counties, since 2015,” Patterson said on the Assembly floor when he introduced the bill Jan. 11 on National Human Trafficking Awareness Day.
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank, nearly half of those trafficked in California are U.S. citizens.
The share of foreign-born victims in the Golden State rose to 54 percent in 2021, up from 36 percent in 2015. Nationally, the share rose from 38 percent to 62 percent during the same period, the institute reported.
“Human trafficking is among the most heinous crimes the FBI encounters,” the bureau’s Director Christopher Wray
said last August. “Unfortunately, such crimes—against both adults and children—are far more common than most people realize.
Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery, according to California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office. It involves compelling or coercing a person to provide labor or services or engage in sex acts for money.
In 2020, the
latest reported year, nearly 2,200 suspects were referred to U.S. Attorneys for human trafficking offenses—a 62-percent increase from 2011—and 1,343 people were prosecuted, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
There were over 27.6 million reported global human trafficking cases in 2021, according to a 2022 report released by the International Labour Organization (
pdf), a United Nations agency promoting labor rights internationally. Of this number, 6.3 million were sexual exploitation victims, the report stated.
