Rage-Farming in the Name of California's Kids
Another case of disingenuous political actors utilizing an ongoing moral panic to attack experts and politicians actually working to fight human trafficking.
This week, right-wing rage-farmers on social media and their news networks were making big hay out of the California State Assembly Committee on Public Safety rejecting SB 14, a Senate bill to raise human trafficking to a “serious felony” and add it to the Three Strikes Law.
Despite originally passing unanimously in the Senate with a bipartisan vote, the narrative is that “the Left” voted it down because, of course, “they are protecting child traffickers & pedophiles”.
We can't speak for the Assembly members or their original votes, yet it seems that they may actually have considered the advice of experts in the field who pointed out that the bill wouldn't likely help, but would instead hinder efforts to reduce child trafficking.
• Analysis of SB 14 for the Public Safety Assembly
Essentially the passage of SB 14 sends more funds to California's prison systems instead of poverty reduction, education, and programs that would actually help kids & their families become less of a target and reduce the economic draw of human trafficking.
A byproduct of current moral panic strains circulating, the bill is written to make voters feel better about focusing on punishment without actually fighting trafficking or the societal problems that allow it to flourish. Yet because of pervasive naivety about the realities of human trafficking, the bill will likely have an unintended pernicious effect seen in other states' laws of punishing the very victims of trafficking themselves.
From Assembly-member Jones-Sawyer:
“Unfortunately, the Three Strikes Model, which SB 14 is designed after, focuses only on punitive actions and does nothing for victims. Spending billions of dollars on punishment means those dollars are unavailable to help victims and prevent the crime from happening in the first place. Criminals already take up a disproportionate amount of funding—spending more to punish more is a poor use of state resources.
SB 14 was granted reconsideration so that I, as chair of the Public Safety Committee, could work together with the author and committee staff to find a way to move forward that respects and protects victims and effectively deters crime.”
Today (Jul 13, 2023) the bill was passed in an emergency vote in the California Assembly.
SB 14 now heads to the Assembly Appropriations Committee after the summer break.
No sane person is trying to defend human traffickers of any kind.
As organizations that are actually involved with fighting trafficking and helping the victims point out, we have underutilized laws already on the books that can still send perpetrators to prison for life, but there are major problems with performative laws that specifically focus on using more tax-payers' money to punish without actually helping and often hurt many of the victims of trafficking.
While context may be lost on those who prefer outrage over logic & reading comprehension, for now we'll just keep shouting this into the void as they yell at those actually trying to reduce human & child trafficking and label the rest of us “pedos” & “groomers”.
(a version of this article is also published on medium)
#california #prison #trafficking #farRight #moralPanic #threeStrikes