TRIBE 4 Children
- Child Protection Policies
- Child Rights
- January 27, 2024
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Senate Bill 14 takes effect as law to prevent child sex trafficking
Video shows street where Odessa Perkins was trafficking, Perkins giving her testimony, and SB 14 explainers Odessa Perkins was trafficked for the first time in 8th grade. Following her experience she helped advocate for SB 14 to prevent traffickers from taking advantage of other kids. Senator Shannon Grove introduced Senate Bill 14 to increase the penalties for people found guilty of human trafficking.It’s a bill now passed as law to help keep victims off the streets. Odessa Perkins remembers walking with her mom down the street from Bakersfield High School. “My mom told me I was helping the family,” Perkins said. Together, they waited here for her trafficker, and when the man arrived, Perkins’ mother exchanged her daughter for drugs. “He took me to a hotel and did whatever it was he wanted to do to me and had me doing different things to him.” She was in junior high at the time. “I was told that I would be nothing more than a mattress for men to lay on,” Perkins said. Video shows street where Odessa Perkins was trafficking, Perkins giving her testimony, and SB 14 explainers Odessa Perkins was trafficked for the first time in 8th grade. Following her experience she helped advocate for SB 14 to prevent traffickers from taking advantage of other kids. Senator Shannon Grove introduced Senate Bill 14 to increase the penalties for people found guilty of human trafficking.It’s a bill now passed as law to help keep victims off the streets. Odessa Perkins remembers walking with her mom down the street from Bakersfield High School. “My mom told me I was helping the family,” Perkins said. Together, they waited here for her trafficker, and when the man arrived, Perkins’ mother exchanged her daughter for drugs. “He took me to a hotel and did whatever it was he wanted to do to me and had me doing different things to him.” She was in junior high at the time. “I was told that I would be nothing more than a mattress for men to lay on,” Perkins said. It’s stories like this, Senator Shannon Grove hoped to prevent when she introduced Senate Bill 14, a piece of legislation with hopes to protect the innocence in our community’s kids. SB 14 would classify child sex trafficking as a serious felony and would increase the penalties for repeat offenders To push the bill forward, Perkins shared her story to help make the bill a law. “Dear Senator, I am before you today as a survivor of human trafficking,” she told the legislators. “It was mind boggling me to experience politics on that level for the very first time,” Perkins recalled. The bill originally began as SB 1042, but it was denied in April 2022. “What do you think that feels like to a victim when you have lifelong trauma. You have constant PTSD and complex PTSD, and yet your trafficker, the man who beat you and reaped you repeatedly and set you up on these dates,…
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