Of all the bills that a legislator should have the easiest time discerning how to vote, you would think that a bill to harshen consequences for child sex trafficking would be at the very top of the list.
But in Colorado, Democrats in the state legislature decided that they couldn’t be bothered to pass legislation to protect children from human trafficking. Earlier this month, the House State, Civic, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee voted 8-3 along party lines against moving a bill to the full chamber that would have enacted harsher consequences for human traffickers.
To repeat that again, the Democrats in the Colorado House of Representatives voted to kill a bill that would have implemented harsher punishments for people who engage in child sex trafficking.
The bill, HB 1092, would have implemented a mandatory minimum sentence of four years in prison for any pedophile who pays to have sex with a child. And, given the nearly universal agreement that all sex trafficking, but especially child sex trafficking, is a horrific crime that should be punished severely, the bill even had a Democratic co-sponsor.
But to understand how egregious it was for Colorado Democrats to shoot down this bill, one has to understand how shockingly lenient the existing legal consequences have been for child sex traffickers.
According to Colorado Politics, Colorado District Attorney John Kellner said people who solicit child prostitutes are often charged and convicted on charges that can carry a sentence that is as light as a period of probation. He noted that of the 33 cases of child sex trafficking cases he has prosecuted, only a third actually saw the perpetrator face a prison sentence.
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Again, to reiterate, under current law, only a third of people who pay to have sex with children in the state of Colorado even go to prison at all. And even a parade of child sex trafficking victims testifying in favor of the bill couldn’t sway lawmakers to enact a basic prison sentence for active pedophiles.
For parents in Colorado, this legislative action should be incredibly worrisome. The refusal of Democrats in the state House to protect children from being sex trafficked raises deeply unsettling and disturbing questions about their comfort with human trafficking. One shudders at how many child sex trafficking victims there will be as a result of this decision.