Georgia’s first couple has made a priority of fighting the selling of children for sex almost since the day they entered the governor’s mansion in 2019. But it’s the kind of evil that needs fighting — and healing — from a number of angles.

Gov. Brian Kemp and First Lady Marty Kemp announced this week that new legislation is coming that would tighten up restrictions on sex traffickers and offer some new relief to victims.

Children who tend to be vulnerable to being sold for sex include runaways or those graduating out of foster care, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vic Reynolds. Though Reynolds has also seen middle-class and well-off victims too. The vast majority of victims are relatively young females, he said, though the GBI does see males being trafficked.

The Kemps’ proposed legislation would have people register as sex offenders if they have a felony conviction for pimping, pandering, or keeping a place of prostitution if the victim is under the age of 18.

Another new law would close what Marty Kemp called a “loophole” by banning sexual contact between a foster parent and a minor foster child. Right now it’s only a crime if the child is under 17. Kemp also wants to ban anybody from having a commercial drivers license if they have used a commercial vehicle to commit sex or labor trafficking.

“We must strengthen our laws to hold the bad actors accountable and aid our survivors and their path to healing,” said Marty Kemp this week at a Capitol press conference. Marty Kemp co-chairs the Georgians for Refuge, Action, Compassion, and Education Commission, which she put together about a year ago to look at ways to combat sex trafficking in the state.

The legal understanding of the difference between adults and children and prostitution and trafficking is changing in Georgia. After years of some legislators asking for the change, a 2019 Georgia law now prevents minors from being charged with prostitution. And according to Reynolds, law enforcement are now more inclined to recognize someone as a trafficking victim whereas before they often saw the person as a criminal defendant.

The Kemps also want legislation to give victims the right to restrict access to any criminal record they got while being trafficked, or to have any judgement against them set aside.

“Victims of sex trafficking are pretty much under the complete control of their traffickers,” said Susan Norris, founder and executive director of Rescuing Hope, a Marietta-based nonprofit that’s working to eradicate sex trafficking and which advised Gov. Kemp’s office on the legislation.

The victim “could be stopped at a traffic stop where their trafficker has drugs or guns in the car, and he’s going to shove all that on their lap and tell them, ‘This is yours,’” Norris said.

The legislation is focused mostly on what’s happened in the past, Norris said, because now more and more law enforcement has gone through training from the victim’s perspective. Officers are learning how to recognize victims’ behavior and how to help.

The GBI’s Reynolds also said that law enforcement has to make a more concentrated effort on the demand side.

“In my opinion, that’s how to stop this, is you is you go after the individuals who are paying for sex,” Reynolds said.

State and federal agencies are important, in part, because they can work across the county and city lines that limit local police jurisdiction.

“We have a unit inside the GBI that works exploitation cases against children,” Reynolds said. “I expect that to morph into some agents who work only trafficking cases.”

Prosecutors, too, are on board with the GRACE Commission’s work and fighting across jurisdiction lines, said the director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia.

“As prosecutors, we will work together with the Attorney General’s office to ensure that county lines are not barriers to pursuing criminals,” said the council’s executive director, Peter Skandalakis.

Norris said there is still a need for services for victims, and a big one right now is transitional housing for survivors, the kind of places where people can get services to help them deal with trauma and put their lives together.

“If you are taken into ‘the life’ (of sexual servitude) at a young age and you do not finish your education, you don’t have your GED, it’s hard to get a job,” Norris said. “If you have charges on your record, it’s hard to get a job, it’s hard to get housing, it’s hard to get scholarships for schooling.”

For younger people, there is residential housing for girls who are sex trafficking victims, Norris said, but no designated place for boys or LGBTQ youth.

She also said there’s also a need for more public education, starting young. Rescuing Hope has a pilot curriculum it’s putting in front of sixth-grade students.

ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp on Tuesday unveiled the specifics of a crackdown on human trafficking he proposed in more broad terms in last week’s State of the State address to the General Assembly.

Kemp asked the Legislature to support three bills that would tighten restrictions in existing state law targeting human traffickers and, in one case, implement a federal rule promulgated last year by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

When he took office last year, Kemp made going after human traffickers a high priority, citing Georgia’s unenviable status as a state with one of the highest rates of human trafficking in the nation. He formed a state commission to tackle the issue and installed his wife, first lady Marty Kemp, as one of three co-chairs.

“We’ve been working around the clock for the past year … fighting this fight to end human trafficking,” Gov. Kemp said during a ceremony announcing his bills. “These pieces of legislation represent a bold next step in this fight.”

The bills the governor plans to introduce during the coming days would:

Allow victims of human ♦ trafficking to restrict access to their criminal records. Victims caught up in prostitution networks formed by traffickers often have trouble finding jobs and/or places to live.

Close a loophole in the state’s sex offender registry law that does not require Georgians convicted of a felony for keeping a place of prostitution, pimping and pandering to register as a sex offender. The legislation also would criminalize improper sexual contact by a foster parent.

♦ Allow the state to revoke the commercial driver’s license of anyone convicted of trafficking an individual for labor servitude or sexual servitude, in accordance with a new federal rule.

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First lady Marty Kemp said the need to add foster parents to the state’s improper sexual contact code was brought to the GRACE Commission’s attention by an actual case.

“There is no consent between a foster parent and a child in his or her custody,” she said. “The law needs to reflect that.”

Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a member of the GRACE Commission, said stories from victims of human trafficking around the state helped generate the legislative package Kemp unveiled Tuesday.

“We’ve taken these opportunities to create legislation that’s going to truly make a difference,” he said.

“We care about the vulnerable, the forgotten, the hurting,” added Georgia House Speaker Pro Tempore Jan Jones, R-Milton, another of the commission’s co-chairs. “The perpetrators will have no safe harbor in Georgia.”

The eyes of Georgia turned briefly to the coast Monday morning as state Rep. Don Hogan, R-St. Simons Island, fulfilled his role in the ceremonial opening of the 2020 session in the state House of Representatives.

“And now, a moment I have been waiting for, for three or four months,” Speaker of the House David Ralston said. “Do y’all feel the tension building? The chair recognizes for the report of the Committee on Information and Audits, the chair of that committee, the gentleman from the 179th District, representing the coast of Georgia, Chairman Don Hogan.”

The recognition was the cause of some mirth within the chamber, as state Rep. Noel Williams Jr., R-Cordele, and state Rep. Matt Dollar, R-Marietta, chuckled throughout the process.

“Just look who you’ve surrounded me with,” Hogan said, referencing Williams and Dollar. “Mr. Speaker, your Committee on Information and Audits has read the journal of the previous legislative day, and found it to be correct. And what a great start of this session.”

The House had a light day, approving a resolution that lays out the schedule for the next 14 legislative days, and going through first and second reading of a number of bills.

Notable among the second readers is H.B. 720, sponsored by state Rep. Steven Sainz, R-Woodbine, among others, which mandates probation to follow prison time for convicted sex offenders. Judges would also have the ability to set a maximum life probation penalty if the defendant is convicted of a felony.

The bill also reorganizes how the state determines risk and how it classifies people considered sexually dangerous.

H.B. 724, lead-sponsored by state Rep. Matthew Wilson, D-Brookhaven, would decriminalize marijuana possession in unincorporated areas of counties, with the maximum penalty limited to a fine of $1,000. Counties would be able to set other, lesser penalties.

H.R. 811, sponsored by state Reps. David Knight, R-Griffin, and Trey Rhodes, R-Greensboro, urges the House to take a closer look at the Spaceport Camden proposal and consider the risks in approving the venture.

Meanwhile in the other chamber, call it the day the lights went out in the Georgia Senate.

A power outage in the area of the State Capitol threw a bit of a wrench into the proceedings in the state’s upper chamber, though the schedule ran close to planned in the House.

Among the first considerations is a bill on internet sales taxes in which the Senate insisted on its version of the bill, H.B. 276, and notified the House. The House voted against the Senate’s amendments to the bill at the end of the 2019 session, which sets things up for a conference committee to work out the differences.

Among the bill’s details, it would require sales taxes for use of ride share apps, and an online marketplace facilitator would be obligated to pay taxes for retail sales, not the marketplace seller. A marketplace facilitator, as defined in the bill, is someone who “contracts with a seller in exchange for any form of consideration to make available or facilitate a retail sale that is taxable under this chapter on behalf of such seller directly or through any agreement with another person….”

Retail sales will be assumed to be made in Georgia “if it is to be held for pickup, used, consumed, distributed, stored for use or consumption or rendered as a service within this state.”

Legislation taken up during first readers today in the House includes a coal ash cleanup bill, H.B. 756, which is one of the policy priorities of House Democrats.

“Under Georgia law, we protect the environment and human health from household trash more than we protect the environment from the dangers of coal ash,” state Rep. Debbie Buckner, D-Junction City, said in a statement.

The bill’s sponsors have a steep hill to climb, both in terms of lobbying and being in the minority party. Republican efforts on coal ash legislation in recent years — notably by state Rep. Jeff Jones, R-St. Simons Island, and state Sen. William Ligon, R-White Oak — never made it out of committee.

Floyd County Juvenile Court Judge Greg Price says some of his fellow jurists remain hesitant to support changing Georgia’s law to let 17-year-olds face justice through the juvenile court system.

Juvenile court judges don’t object in principle to increasing the age to 18 from 17, when suspected criminals are automatically charged as an adult. Instead, they worry the juvenile system lacks resources to handle the resulting  higher caseload or services tailored to teenagers.

Judges, prosecutors, criminal justice reform advocates and state lawmakers met for a “Raise the Age” discussion at the state Capitol Friday to discuss legislation that lawmakers could pass this year. A lawmaker backing the bill says increasing the age to charge as an adult should keep more teens out of state prisons and also prevent them from having a public criminal record that follows them into adulthood.

Price said it’s imperative that the state properly invest in treatment services and other programs for youth offenders if the law is changed.

“We don’t need another unfunded mandate from the Legislature,” said Price, vice president of the Council of Juvenile Court Judges of Georgia. “Until you do it with the right services in place, you’re not doing anything to reduce recidivism if you just change the location of the court.”

State Rep. Mandi Ballinger, a Republican from Canton, said she’s still pushing to get House Bill 440 passed in the upcoming session. But her plan is for the new law not to take effect until juvenile justice officials and other experts develop the plan.

Eleven states increased the age to treat nonviolent offenders as adults in the past decade or so, most recently including North Carolina and Missouri.

Some lawmakers are raising concerns that hardened criminals who are 17 might get off with too little punishment and others connected to criminal justice systems worry about potential costs and how the transition would take place, she said. She wants to allow time to iron out those issues.

“If we’re going to get coordinated and make this happen in 2020, we need to get on the same page,” Ballinger said.

Georgia, Texas and Wisconsin are the three states where 17-year-olds must go through adult courts, according to the Washington D.C.-based Campaign for Youth Justice.

A 17-year-old that commits a serious crime like a sex offense or armed robbery would still go through the normal adult court system, according to language now in the Georgia bill.

Most of the states that pass the law take 18-months to two years before it goes into effect, said Marcy Mistrett, CEO of Campaign for Youth Justice.

“I feel like the moral argument has been won on this issue,” she said. “We know that most 17-year-olds look more like 16-year-olds than adults in terms of their arrest patterns, mostly very low-level offenses.”

A GBI report shows about 6,500 17-year-olds were charged with crimes in 2018. In November 2019, 77 17-year-old inmates and a 16-year-old inmate were incarcerated in three state prisons with adults, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections.

If those teenagers are taken out of the state’s adult prison population, the cost of processing the 18-year-olds in the juvenile system could fall heavily on local governments, said Debra Nesbit, associate legislative director for the Association County Commissioners of Georgia.

“Look at the resources and funding and follow it to make sure that if you close a youth detention center, that that money then goes over to a local court for those local services,” she said.