Newsom pushes California to crack down on sex trafficking — fast
-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
- Those fighting trafficking often live in their own silos, failing or refusing to share even scant details with other jurisdictions.
- A report at the end of 60 days isn’t results. But it’s an acknowledgment that California needs to do better, and a road map to get there.
SACRAMENTO — California has spent millions of dollars to combat sex trafficking, and yet it can still be found in every city and town, hiding in plain sight.
Whether it’s online, on places such as Figueroa Street in L.A. or Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento, or even in the hotel rooms where our World Cup guests stayed, there are thousands of women and girls being sexually exploited in California right now, despite all that money and all the resources it has purchased.
“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 tiny second-floor dance studio built for survivors of trafficking.
Siebel Newsom was there to watch Newsom sign an executive order that was driven by her work as an advocate for survivors of trafficking. On its surface, the order may not sound like much and isn’t likely to make the news. It calls for most of the major state agencies to come up with a plan within 60 days to work together to curb trafficking and help survivors.
Hardly an earth-shattering demand. But believe it or not, one of the biggest barriers that our state faces, in this great age of technology and always-on connection, is that there is little collaboration between the folks fighting traffickers.
MAGA has built its rage-filled movement pretending to protect children. Now, it’s going after LGBTQ+ marriage, claiming it harms kids.
Yes, we have about 35 task forces statewide working on this issue and sometimes they run joint operations. But more often, those fighting trafficking live in their own silos, doing their own work, and often failing or refusing to share even scant details with other jurisdictions.
The same holds true for the many organizations that work with survivors, most of which have come on the scene only in the last few decades as sex trafficking morphed from a crime in which children were viewed as complicit to one in which we understand that they are victims.
Those organizations often do great work, but they too often do it alone. A survivor — or a girl being trafficked and looking for escape — has no easy way to find someone to help her. It’s largely luck, the right outreach person in the right place at the right time, or a cop who has taken the time and care to know what the resources are.
“We are so fragmented,” Sharmin Bock told the governor. She’s a former prosecutor in Alameda County who tried the first sex trafficking case in the U.S. Now, she’s advising the first partner on how California can do a better job fighting the predators — traffickers and buyers alike — who daily trade cash for the use of a human body, willing or not.
Bock points out that while those fighting against trafficking lack collaboration, the opposite is true of the criminals. Up and down the state, they are organized. A trafficker might pick up his victim in one city, only to transport her to another city to meet buyers. Victims are moved often, and even sold or traded to other traffickers.
Once a victim crosses a jurisdictional line, everything that happened on the other side of it too often gets lost in the nowhere land of bureaucracy and red tape. A move from Los Angeles to Riverside, and the girl might as well be in Taiwan, as Bock puts it.
“We need to stop asking whose case is this, and rather ask 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 accountability because critical information was sitting in another agency’s database.”
So while Newsom’s demand for a 60-day plan might not sound like much, it goes to the heart of what ails the system.
“Traffickers collaborate every day,” Bock said. “Traffickers have built networks to exploit children. We must build stronger networks to protect them.”
Chabria: Trump goes after Newsom’s wife? Unsurprising, but also a new level of authoritarianism
The Department of Justice investigating Jennifer Siebel Newsom has all the appearances of the Trump administration seeking to stop a political rival who has a real shot at knocking MAGA out of the top office.
Newsom drew a parallel to the plague of retail theft that captivated the state not long ago, and which the state has successfully combated. Though 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 that knew how to exploit not just victims, but systems.
Now he’s looking for that kind of “momentum,” to solve this most stubborn of abuses.
“For the last few years, I thought I could buy my way out of this,” Newsom said with a shocking bit of honesty, pointing to all that budget money that has been invested. But, he said, he’s clear now that it’s not a money problem. It’s a people problem.
“How is that possible? “ the governor wondered. The executive order, he said, is about saying “enough of just good intentions ... we’re not delivering fundamental results.”
A report at the end of 60 days isn’t results. But it’s an acknowledgment that California needs to do better, and a road map to get there.
That’s crucial. Like Siebel Newsom and the governor, I’ve got two teenage daughters and I know just how vulnerable girls are, in the best of circumstances.
With all our resources and good intentions, California can’t continue to let predators win simply because they’re more organized.
More to Read
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Viewpoint
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
- The article argues that sex trafficking remains pervasive in California despite years of investment, with women and girls exploited in communities and online, and that current efforts have failed to deliver meaningful reductions because the statewide response is still fragmented.[1][2][10]
- It contends that one of the central problems is the lack of collaboration and information-sharing among task forces, state agencies, and survivor-serving organizations, noting that traffickers operate through organized, cross-jurisdictional networks while authorities and nonprofits remain in silos.[1][2][5]
- The piece suggests that Newsom’s new executive order, which requires major state agencies to produce a joint anti-trafficking plan within 60 days, is a crucial step toward building coordinated networks, shared strategies, and common data systems that can link investigations and hold traffickers accountable.[9][4][11]
- It further argues that the state should apply lessons from its recent crackdown on organized retail theft—such as pressuring online platforms, strengthening interagency coordination, and closing bureaucratic loopholes—to sex trafficking, while recognizing that exploiting children is far more serious than property crime.[4][8][9]
- The article emphasizes a victim-centered rationale for coordination, asserting that survivors and exploited youth currently depend on chance encounters with informed officers or outreach workers, and that stronger networks are needed to ensure rapid access to shelter, services, and long-term safety.[1][2][6]
Different views on the topic
- Some evaluations of California’s response to commercial sexual exploitation of children argue that uneven collaboration reflects deeper structural issues, including shortages of appropriate placements, staff turnover, and conflicting mandates between child welfare and probation, suggesting that coordination plans alone cannot overcome limited capacity and resources.[2][1]
- Other analyses stress that state anti-trafficking efforts have focused heavily on sex trafficking while neglecting labor trafficking, contending that reforms centered on sex trade networks risk leaving many exploited workers unprotected unless the strategy is broadened significantly.[10][1]
- Academic work on cross-sector collaboration highlights persistent tensions between information-sharing and victim confidentiality, including fears that undocumented survivors could face deportation, leading some service providers to resist closer integration with law enforcement despite calls for more robust data sharing.[7][1]
- Reports on whole-of-government approaches warn that coordination mechanisms can diffuse responsibility across multiple agencies without establishing a single accountable authority, raising concerns that executive directives for collaboration may add bureaucracy without guaranteeing that “the overall system actually works.”[3][9]
- Some child-advocacy organizations emphasize that many commercially sexually exploited children do not recognize themselves as victims and are concealed from public systems, arguing that investment in education, outreach, and culturally competent services is as critical as interagency networking and cautioning against assuming that better coordination alone will ensure identification and recovery.[6][2]