SLO County lawmaker continues fight against human trafficking with 3 new bills
Central Coast Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham on Tuesday announced his latest package of proposed legislation to combat human trafficking, at a news conference at Cal Poly’s California Cybersecurity Institute.
The package is the latest of several bills — some of which have been signed into law — that the former San Luis Obispo prosecutor has authored over the past two years to fight sexual and labor trafficking.
“Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world, and it’s happening right here on the Central Coast,” Cunningham said in a written statement. “While we’ve been successful in getting anti-human-trafficking bills signed into law over the past several years, there’s still more to do to protect trafficking victims and increase awareness of the trafficking warning signs.”
Cunningham announced Tuesday that his 2020 anti-human-trafficking legislative package includes three bills.
Assembly Bill 2008 would require the California State Bar to post an online listing, organized by county, of attorneys who provide legal services to trafficking victims at no charge.
Assembly Bill 2009 would incorporate human trafficking awareness training into California professional truckers’ educational materials so that truckers can more easily identify the signs of trafficking. The bill has been sponsored by Truckers Against Trafficking, a national organization whose mission is to educate and mobilize members of the trucking, busing, and energy industries to combat human trafficking.
In regard to the bill, Truckers Against Trafficking deputy director Kylla Lanier wrote that the organization urges the Legislature to “pass this bill and educate this next generation of drivers.”
“If every driver, prior to ever hitting the road, had this life-saving information and training, imagine how many more calls will be made, imagine how many victims will be recovered out of this horrible reality, how many perpetrators — both the traffickers and the buyers of commercial sex — will be arrested,” Lanier said in the news release.
The final bill, Assembly Bill 2010, would allow mobile dating applications to alert users if somebody they had been in contact with had been reported for trafficking, among other issues, Cunningham’s office says. That bill has been sponsored by Match.com, according to the news release.
“Match Group is proud to work with Assembly member Cunningham to enact legislation that is designed to help protect online dating users from fraud,” wrote Mark Buse, vice president and head of government relations for Match Group. “We will continue to fight to pass legislation such as this in California and elsewhere across the nation.”
Since being elected to the Assembly in 2016, the two-term Cunningham has authored three anti-human trafficking bills that have since been signed into law:
- AB 1735, passed in 2018, allows trafficking victims to apply for a 10-year protective order to prohibit the victim’s trafficker from contacting the victim.
- AB 1736, also passed in 2018, allows prosecutors to use statements previously made by victims during trials against traffickers
- AB 662, passed in 2019, gives law enforcement officers additional means to close “trafficking hot spots” such as massage parlors, and also allows law enforcement to require solicitors to register as sex offenders in extreme cases.
According to the California Attorney General’s Office, human trafficking is a $150 billion-a-year global industry and among the world’s “fastest growing criminal enterprises.”
The International Labor Organization estimates that there are more than 24.9 million human-trafficking victims worldwide at any time, and the U.S. State Department has estimated that 14,500 to 17,500 victims are trafficked into the U.S. each year.
California is one of the nation’s top destination states for such trafficking, the Attorney General’s Office says.
Cunningham’s office says that all three bills announced Tuesday will be heard in Assembly committees in the spring.
