SACRAMENT- California has spent millions of dollars to combat sex trafficking and yet it can still be found in every city and town, hidden in plain sight.
Whether 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 stayed, there are thousands of women and girls who are being sexually exploited in California right now, despite all that money and all the resources it has acquired.
“The reality is that few threats to a woman's safety are as brutal or as overlooked as sex trafficking,” first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom said Monday, sitting with her husband, the governor, in a small second-floor dance studio built for trafficking survivors.
Siebel Newsom was there to see Newsom sign an executive order prompted by her work as an advocate for trafficking survivors. At first glance, the order may not seem like a big deal and is unlikely to make news. Calls for most major state agencies to come up with a plan within 60 days to work together to stop trafficking and help survivors.
It is not a transcendental requirement. But believe it or not, one of the biggest barriers our state faces, in this great era of technology and constant connection, is that there is little collaboration between the people fighting traffickers.
Yes, we have about 35 task forces across the state working on this issue and sometimes they do joint operations. But more often than not, those fighting trafficking live in their own silos, do their own work, and often do not or refuse to share even the smallest details with other jurisdictions.
The same applies to the many organizations that work with survivors, most of which have only emerged on the scene in the last few decades, when sex trafficking shifted from a crime in which children were seen as accomplices to one in which we understand them to be victims.
Those organizations often do great work, but too often they do it alone. A survivor (or a trafficked girl looking to escape) has no easy way to find someone to help her. It's largely luck, the right person in the right place at the right time, or a police officer who has taken the time and care to know what the resources are.
“We are very fragmented,” Sharmin Bock told the governor. She is a former prosecutor in Alameda County who tried the first sex trafficking case in the U.S. Now, she is advising the first partner on how California can do a better job fighting predators (both traffickers and buyers) who daily exchange cash for the use of a human body, willingly or not.
Bock points out that while those who fight against trafficking lack collaboration, the opposite is true with criminals. They are organized throughout the state. A trafficker may pick up his victim in one city and then transport him to another city to meet buyers. Victims are frequently transferred and even sold or exchanged with other traffickers.
Once a victim crosses a jurisdictional line, everything that happened on the other side is too often lost in the nowhere land of bureaucracy and bureaucracy. If he moves from Los Angeles to Riverside, the girl could very well be in Taiwan, as Bock says.
“We have to stop asking whose case this is and instead ask ourselves, how do we solve this case together? How do we solve the problem together?” Bock said. “Collaboration recovers children sooner, links investigation, dismantles trafficking organizations, and holds traffickers accountable. A trafficker should never escape responsibility because there is critical information in another agency's database.”
So while Newsom's demand for a 60-day plan may not seem like a big deal, it goes to the heart of what ails the system.
“Traffickers collaborate every day,” Bock said. “Traffickers have created networks to exploit children. We must build stronger networks to protect them.”
Newsom drew a parallel to the plague of retail theft that gripped the state not long ago and that the state has successfully combated. While he was careful to draw the obvious line that stealing a tube of toothpaste is a far cry from sexually exploiting a child, he pointed out similarities: online platforms that turned a blind eye, a lack of coordination between agencies, criminals who knew how to exploit not only victims, but systems as well.
Now it is looking for that kind of “push” to resolve the most persistent of abuses.
“For the last few years, I thought I could buy my way out of this,” Newsom said with surprising honesty, pointing to all that budget money that has been invested. But, he said, he is now clear that it is not a money problem. It's a people problem.
“How is that possible?” the governor asked. The executive order, he said, tries to say “enough of the good intentions…we are not achieving fundamental results.”
A report after 60 days is no result. But it's an acknowledgment that California needs to improve and a roadmap to get there.
That's crucial. Like Siebel Newsom and the governor, I have two teenage daughters and know how vulnerable girls are, under the best of circumstances.
With all our resources and good intentions, California cannot continue to let predators win simply because they are more organized.
