Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell announced Wednesday that his department will immediately stop arresting children on prostitution charges.
“They are child victims and survivors of rape,” McDonnell wrote in a letter to his employees. “We must remember that children cannot consent to sex under any circumstance.”
Changing the way such children are viewed, from suspect to victim, falls in tandem with a national trend in recent years and marks a “major shift from where all of us in policing had been throughout history,” McDonnell said during a news conference Wednesday.
Read more in the Los Angeles Times.