Raping a sixteen year old is a crime. Why don’t we treat it like one?

In May of 2010, a pimp picked up a runaway sixteen year-old girl. After giving her some marijuana and ecstasy he told her that he wanted her to engage in commercial sex. She said no. That night, when she returned to the apartment where she was staying, the pimp beat her up, bombarded her with threats, and then put her in his 1999 Mercedes Benz and drove her to a Holiday Inn. There he led the visibly bruised, terrified child to the hotel room of Lawrence Taylor, a hall of fame ex-professional football player. And what did Mr. Taylor do when she arrived at his door? He paid $300 to rape her.

What makes this atrocity even more frightening is the recourse that our society and justice system had for Mr. Taylor’s actions. When asked to side with a child who was forced into prostitution or a celebrity who raped her, our court system chose the celebrity, charging him with the misdemeanor of “sexual misconduct” and absolutely no jail time. At his sentencing, his victim was present, but was not allowed to read her impact statement. Imagine how it must have felt to sit in a courtroom and hear someone say that the act of paying to have you kidnapped, beaten, sold and raped is somehow translated into a minor offense of “misconduct” with no real penalty.

And while the unfair treatment of celebrities can be frustrating, the true tragedy is that this same treatment is often given to men all across our country when they are caught buying commercial sex from trafficking victims. They are given a slap on the wrist and let go, essentially pardoning an act of commercial rape, while their victims are labeled “child prostitutes” and sometimes even punished for what they have gone through. While we have made some great progress in protecting victims with safe-harbor laws that prevent prostituted children from being criminalized, we still have a long ways to go in terms of seriously increasing the penalties that a john faces for purchasing commercial sex. Until men face substantial criminal penalties for paying for the services of sex traffickers and engaging in rape, we won’t stand a chance in combating sex trafficking as a whole.

After being sentenced with nothing more than a probation period, Mr. Taylor indicated that it was not his fault that the young girl he raped had been trafficked, saying, “I didn’t pick her up at no playground.”

That’s right, he didn’t have to go to a playground, because he had already paid the pimp to do that part for him. And by way of a deep injustice, that simple fact has allowed Mr. Taylor and far too many other johns to walk away scot-free.