In the weeks leading up to a key committee hearing, California’s Assembly Bill 379 has drawn sharp, emotional reactions from elected officials and law enforcement figures—including Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig, who took to social media to accuse Democratic lawmakers of “hesitating” to protect children from sex trafficking.
His words were dramatic: “No debate—purchasing minors for sex is vile. Lawmakers opposing this have lost all sense. Protect kids, pass this law!” It’s an incendiary charge, calculated to provoke moral panic and short-circuit deliberation. But the real danger isn’t in lawmakers’ hesitation—it’s in the bill itself.
AB 379 doesn’t address trafficking with care or nuance. Instead, it revives failed policies of the past: vague loitering laws, intent-based profiling, and carceral solutions that put marginalized communities—especially Black, Brown, immigrant, LGBTQ+, and unhoused people—at even greater risk. Its creation of a new misdemeanor offense for “loitering with intent to purchase sex” echoes the discredited Penal Code 653.22, repealed just two years ago for its discriminatory application.
As the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST) warns in its powerful opposition to AB 379: “AB 379 does not prevent human trafficking—it reinforces the very systems that make people vulnerable to it.”
This bill does not represent progress. It represents regression—back to a time when presence on a street corner, the way someone dressed, or their proximity to poverty was enough to land them in jail. It’s a return to law enforcement discretion as policy, to surveillance as care, and to punishment as the primary vehicle for public morality.
The loitering provisions are the beginning of the problem.
AB 379 would once again allow officers to arrest individuals for “intent” to buy sex based on ambiguous indicators: repeated driving in an area, stopping to talk to pedestrians, circling the block, or being in a neighborhood known for commercial sex. But intent is not action. And these are behaviors that thousands of Californians engage in daily.
As CAST points out, these laws don’t stop harm. They create harm. They give law enforcement broad discretion to target people based on “gut feeling” and stereotype. When the previous loitering statute was in effect, data from the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office revealed that 72% of those arrested were Black, and the vast majority were young women, many with no prior convictions for sex work.
There is a documented history of loitering enforcement in California—and AB 379 proposes to reauthorize the very same logic, under the banner of child protection.
What gets overlooked is that many people targeted under loitering laws are themselves survivors of trafficking, or vulnerable to it. When police use presence, clothing, or neighborhood as proxies for criminality, they end up arresting the very people we claim to want to help.
Proponents of AB 379 argue that criminalizing buyers will reduce the demand for sexual exploitation. But the “end demand” model has been widely discredited by human rights organizations and public health experts.
As CAST rightly notes: “AB 379 repeats the failed ‘end demand’ strategy that too often results in the arrest and criminalization of people selling sex—including those who are being trafficked—while ignoring the root causes of exploitation.”
Research from the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership, Amnesty International, and the USC International Human Rights Clinic has shown that when buyers are criminalized through street-level crackdowns, survivors are pushed into more dangerous conditions. They are forced to move faster, negotiate less, and meet in isolated locations. Violence increases. Accountability decreases.
When buyers are criminalized in this way, it is not the wealthy sex tourist or organized trafficker who is caught up in enforcement—it’s the low-income person in a car, or the trans woman walking down the street.
We need to look at key factors: Who gets arrested? Who gets prosecuted? And who gets left behind?
AB 379 creates a “Survivor Support Fund” to help victims of trafficking. This sounds promising—until you realize that the fund is not supported through general state funding or permanent appropriations. Instead, it depends entirely on court fines: a $1,000 penalty imposed on those convicted under the new loitering statute.
Not only is this an unstable source of revenue—fines and fees are notoriously difficult to collect—but it ties survivor care to a pipeline of arrests and convictions.
It is, quite literally, a funding model that depends on ongoing criminalization.
And that’s not all. As outlined in the Assembly Public Safety Committee’s analysis, a $1,000 base fine would balloon to more than $4,000 once all the mandatory state and local assessments are added. These added fees often fall on people already struggling with poverty, housing insecurity, and legal system debt. In other words, the very people who may have been coerced or exploited end up saddled with impossible financial burdens.
AB 379 also promises “diversion” for people charged with selling sex—allowing judges to suspend prosecution and direct individuals into services. But coercive diversion is not liberation. It’s not trauma-informed. And it’s not voluntary.
CAST explains it well: “When survivors are forced into services under threat of prosecution, those services are no longer trauma-informed or voluntary. Many mandatory programs fail to reflect the realities and needs of participants, often punishing non-compliance with further court involvement.”
We must stop pretending that access to care should come through the courtroom door. We don’t require cancer patients to be arrested before they access healthcare. We don’t require job seekers to be prosecuted before offering them support. So why do we require survivors of trafficking to be criminalized before they’re offered help?
What survivors and communities actually need is clear:
- Stable housing
- Trauma-informed healthcare
- Mental health support
- Legal advocacy
- Job training
- Culturally relevant services from trusted community organizations
They do not need vague “intent” laws. They do not need loitering arrests. And they do not need funding for care to be contingent on carceral churn.
As CAST and dozens of survivor-led and public health organizations emphasize, AB 379 will not prevent trafficking. It will perpetuate the conditions that allow it to flourish: poverty, marginalization, systemic racism, and punitive laws that criminalize survival.
DA Jeff Reisig may genuinely believe he’s protecting children. But his rhetoric—claiming lawmakers have “lost all sense” for hesitating to pass this bill—is not a substitute for thoughtful policy. It frames complex, systemic issues as moral binaries: you’re either for the bill or you’re complicit in abuse.
But we can reject AB 379 and still stand firmly against exploitation.
In fact, rejecting this bill is the morally courageous choice—because it means choosing evidence over emotion, care over control, and healing over punishment.
Lawmakers must resist the urge to legislate out of fear or political expediency. AB 379 offers the illusion of action while expanding the power of a system that has already failed too many.
It’s time to stop recycling criminal codes and start investing in communities. Survivors don’t need more arrests. They need safety, stability, and support. AB 379 doesn’t provide that.
“No debate—purchasing minors for sex is vile. Lawmakers opposing this have lost all sense. Protect kids, pass this law!”
I can’t understand how anyone can be against this. This is why democrats and progressives are out of touch with the people.
I thought I explained pretty well. Why people were against it.
Sounds point for point like arguments you make on other subjects that you are on one side and Reisig is on the other. That’s why I like having the Davis Vanguard around . . . whatever DG say, I do opposite world.