Proposed legislation to protect child victims of human trafficking passed the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday, the same day advocates and supporting legislators rallied at the state Capitol.

The legislation, SB 554, known as the safe harbor law, would recognize these children as victims and not as criminals.

“Thousands of children are coerced into sexual servitude each year, and have been charged with crimes of prostitution and drug trafficking,” State Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, R-Montgomery County, the bill’s prime sponsor, said in a press statement.

“There is no such thing as a child prostitute — they are children, not legally capable of such consent. Now is the time to prevent the child victims of this heinous crime from gaining a criminal record and being unjustly punished while the real criminals go free,” he said.

“Sometimes, victims of sex trafficking break the law because they are forced to or out of survival,” said Ashley Gay Vocco, Family Services Inc. victim services program director. “This bill recognizes that and it will enable the law to recognize that child victims are forced into these sexual encounters. They are not ‘prostituting’ themselves out, but rather, are sold to buyers who are willing to pay for their bodies.”

SB 554 also would require law enforcement to report any encounter with a minor who has been subjected to sexual exploitation and provide housing, education, life-skills training and counseling to these child victims.

“I can tell you this bill takes those protections an additional step in the right direction, and we’re not quite there yet,” said Shea Rhodes, director of Villanova Law Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation. “Our child victims are still being criminalized for crimes that are happening to them, not crimes that are being committed by them.”

Rhodes said five children were arrested, charged and prosecuted for the crime of prostitution in various state counties in 2017, citing data from the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.

The National District Attorneys Association suggests there are between 100,000 and 300,000 children commercially exploited in the United States each year with 273 human trafficking cases reported in Pennsylvania since 2016.

An estimated 1 in 6 of the 18,500 or 3,083 runaways reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2016 were possibly sex trafficking victims, according to the center.

Thirty-four states have safe harbor laws, according to Polaris, a nonprofit dedicated to eradicating modern slavery.

Polaris said states developed these laws in order to address “inconsistencies with how children that are exploited for commercial sex are treated” and to ensure legal protection and provision of services.

The safe harbor proposed legislation passed the Senate unanimously in April 2017 and now can be considered by the full House.

Mirror Staff Writer Shen Wu Tan is at 946-7457.