During this legislative session, significant efforts have been made to combat crimes against children, with multiple bills presented and passed to enhance the safety of children in Utah. Late Wednesday night, two bills, HB207 and HB358, were passed to protect minors and hold offenders accountable.
“Utah has an urgent need for immediate action to tackle the high rate of child sexual abuse,” Rep. Stephen L. Whyte, R-Mapleton, previously said when discussing his bill in committee.
Whyte’s bill HB207, Sexual Offense Revisions, proposes changes to sentencing regulations for repeat sexual offenders, broadens the definition of child exploitation to encompass situations where an offender accesses child sexual abuse material with the intent to view it, and eliminates the option of a lesser sentence for sexual offenders who engaged with minors ages 14 to 18.
“We’ve looked at other states that have mandatory language. Colorado does a year. Wyoming does two years, Arizona does five,” the bill’s senate sponsor, Majority Assistant Whip Sen. Michael Mckell, R-Spanish Fork, said during Senate floor time Wednesday.
Utah’s current guideline recommends 105 days for repeat sexual offenders.
“These are our worst offenders that create the most havoc and the biggest problems. And I think this is a tool that our attorney general’s office needs as well as our prosecutors,” Mckell said. “This is a serious problem in Utah,” adding that according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Utah is fifth in the nation in terms of minor sex abuse.
Though the bill passed through the Legislature, some lawmakers from both sides of the aisle voted against it, arguing that simply increasing incarceration would not solve the problem.
Although she agreed with holding the “nefarious people” accountable and keeping them off the streets, Minority Caucus Manager Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, said, “We cannot incarcerate our way into a better world. We need to start working on preventing some of these things from happening and educating our youth and our people on how to prevent some of this from happening.”
Senate Rules Vice Chair Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan, also voted against the bill. Though he agreed, like Riebe, with the bill’s purpose of incarcerating child sex offenders, he couldn’t look past the increase in costs this would create for Utah taxpayers.
“We’re not being fully honest and transparent with our constituents when we pass this kind of a policy and then don’t provide a way to pay for it in the budget,” he said. “If we’re going to pass this bill and bills like it, we ought to be honest with our constituents about what it costs and that if we want to have this” then there are other bills that won’t be funded.
Protecting children virtually
With unanimous bipartisan support, HB358, Criminal Sexual Conduct Amendments, received no votes against it during its legislative process.
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Verona Mauga, D-Salt Lake County, stated during the House floor session that, until this bill, there was no law protecting minors in the virtual reality world regarding cyber sex abuse.
“This bill makes it a crime for an adult to engage in sexual activity with a child under 14 using virtual reality,” she said. “It also extends protection to minors, ages 14 to 17, when the predator is 10 or more years older. The other thing that it does is it stops people in positions of power from coercing explicit materials from those in custody.”
Because it is not always clear what age a person is when participating in VR, Mauga said the bill has been thoroughly written “to ensure that we’re capturing actual predators and not gamers or horse playing in the bill.”