California must crack down on predatory sex buyers to stop trafficking. Survivors like us have fought for accountability that reaches not just our traffickers but also men who used us like objects.
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In May, the California Capitol erupted in acrimonious debate over Assembly Bill 379, a proposal to make purchasing a 16- or 17-year-old for sex punishable as a felony. Now, opponents are trying to weaken a separate, equally important piece of that bill, to make it a misdemeanor to loiter with the intent to purchase commercial sex.
California must crack down on predatory sex buyers to stop sex trafficking. For decades, survivors like us have fought for accountability that reaches not just our traffickers, but also the men who bought and used us like objects.
These buyers, the ones who made the demand for human flesh profitable, have operated with near impunity, shielded by stigma that falls harder on victims than perpetrators.
AB 379, originally authored by Assemblymember Maggy Krell, D-Sacramento, and now authored by Assemblymember Nick Schultz, D-Burbank, is a historic opportunity to change that.
Don’t shield men who buy sex
Standing in the way are opponents attempting to weaponize the federal government’s cruel deportation sweeps and legitimate public fear to weaken this vital legislation. They claim that AB 379’s loitering provision should be removed because it would create a new deportable offense.
That argument is legally doubtful. Following its recommendation would shield sex buyers statewide at the expense of victims of the sex trade. It also would deprive California of an important tool for getting a handle on the sex trafficking industry.
That is not safety nor is it justice. That would be an abdication of lawmakers’ responsibility totheir constituents.
Let us be clear: AB 379 does not target undocumented people or victims in the sex trade. It purposefully targets those who knowingly and willfully seek out vulnerable human beings, some of whom are immigrants themselves, for exploitation through paid rape.
It is unconscionable to use the trauma of immigrant families as a political shield for sex buyers − many of whom are affluent White men. And yet, that’s what’s happening.
We were badly abused as victims of sex trafficking
This is the truth that the public and our elected officials must face: The sex trade is not “empowerment.” On the street, it is almost all the result of trafficking. It is violence, and the buyers are not harmless “johns” ‒ they are predators who rely on the silence of society and the shame of survivors to keep operating freely.
Buyers call us names like “meat,” “holes,” “property,” “whore,” “slut,” “worthless,” “slave” and much worse than can be comfortably described here for the everyday reader.
We’ve been choked and strangled, degraded, urinated on, burned, beaten and stabbed. We’ve been robbed, raped with physical body parts and objects, spit on and laughed at. We’ve been thrown out of moving vehicles naked and scared, and we’ve been left for dead on multiple occasions of severe assault.
We’ve been told we were “lucky” anyone would pay for us. We’ve been told that they could do anything to us and no one would care, that they could kill us and no one would come looking.
We were children. Or barely adults. And every name we were called sank into our skin like a scar we still carry.
Failing to hold buyers accountable only worsens these harms and creates more demand and need for supply.
AB379’s reinstatement of the loitering piece for the buyer is not radical. It is justice for everyone being trafficked and abandoned on our streets.
To every state senator still on the fence: We are not asking for pity. We are demanding protection, accountability and truth. We’re asking you not to forget us just because the politics are complicated.
We survived the buyers who raped and abused us, insulted us, filmed us, and discarded us like garbage. Now we are surviving a political process that threatens to discard us yet again.
Please don’t let that happen. We’ve come too far. Stay strong, stand with survivors and pass AB 379 intact, and with the survivor-led accountability it was built to deliver.
Marjorie Saylor, Ashley Faison-Maddox and Christina Rangel are survivor leaders with lived experience of sex trafficking in California.
