Video Screengrab / California State Senate
CV NEWS FEED // California state Sen. Susan Eggman, D-Stockton, blasted members of her own party for weakening a bill aimed at combating child sex trafficking and prostitution.
“As a progressive proud member of this body for the last 12 years, I’m done,” Eggman said on the floor of the California State Capitol last Thursday. “I’m done with us protecting people who would buy and abuse our children. I’m done.”
“I don’t want to send more black and brown men to prison,” noted the lawmaker. “I don’t want more people in prison. But I don’t want people buying girls.”
“I don’t want people buying little girls anymore,” Eggman continued. “And I’m tired of saying it’s okay, and that we have to protect the men who do it.”
Eggman cited her experience as a social worker and working with many people “wounded to their core” by sexual violence. “We have a moral responsibility to say, ‘Enough,’” she stressed. “Enough.”
“We have given away enough on this area and we’ve got to move back into the center or we all look like fools and laughingstocks,” the senator told fellow Democrats.
“And what do we stand for?” Eggman asked.
She went on to describe a place in Sacramento “where girls are being bought and sold.” Soft-on-crime policies are helping the pedophiles there continue to abuse girls, she argued:
Men are being given a slap in the hand or a couple of days, and then they are back out again and they do the same thing. They get caught over, and over, and over again and somehow that’s okay.
“It is not okay anymore, and no more on my watch,” Eggman said.
The senator made the viral speech in defense of SB 1414, legislation that would raise the penalty for buying or selling a minor for sex in California “to at least two to four years in prison, as well as a sex offender registration,” according to The New York Post.
The Post noted that under current law in the deep-blue state, “buying or soliciting sex from a child is a misdemeanor that carries a penalty of between two days and a year in jail and a $10,000 fine.”
“Last month, some Democrats had watered down [SB 1414] to only allow the felony classification for the purchase of minors under the age of 16,” The Post also reported.
