Amy is 16 years old. She has survived abuse at home and is being sex trafficked on the street in a nice suburban town in Ventura County. Like Amy (whose name has been changed to protect her), dozens of young girls and boys in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties are vulnerable to commercial sexual exploitation and are often recruited by their own peers for a pay bonus.
Because of real cases like this, there is a growing awareness in the United States of human trafficking for labor and sexual exploitation. This is not simply a problem in other parts of the world, and it doesn’t just consist of individuals brought across international or state borders. The recruitment and exploitation goes on here in our own hometowns, and foster youth, homeless individuals, and survivors of domestic violence are particularly susceptible.
We must remain committed to fight perpetrators who manipulate children for personal gain. Existing law offers judges very little flexibility when they determine the sentencing of these heinous criminals. This often results in inadequate sentences that are not sufficient deterrents against repeat criminal behavior, or sentences that are inadequate given the nature of the trafficking operation in question. That is why I have introduced AB 2513, a bill to provide judges with the discretion to consider the vulnerability of the victim as an aggravating factor when sentencing human trafficking criminals.