Commentary: Newsom pushes California to crack down on sex trafficking fast
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Set us as preferred 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 ...