CALIFORNIA, USA — Wearing a red and white checkered dress for what appeared to be old school pictures, Odessa Perkins looked back at an image of herself as a four-year-old with a grin on her face.
In this picture, Perkins is smiling, even though her family gave her nothing to smile about during those young years.
“I started being touched around between four and six years old, which is a sort of form of grooming because anyone who's going to do anything like that to you is not going to straight out start doing what they're going to do,” Perkins said
By the age of seven, she was raped.
“I was actually penetrated when I was about seven years old and then that just went on forever,” Perkins said.
By 13, she was being passed around.
“I started being trafficked around high school, about 13 years old," she said. "I was actually trafficked by my mother.”
She shared more details about the person she was supposed to trust the most.
“She would have me take showers, we would put on perfume and different things like that," Perkins said. "Then she would walk me down the street from where we lived and have the drug dealers and different things like that pick me up. They would take me to the hotels and do whatever it is they wanted me to do.
It did not stop with her mother.
“My uncle molested me multiple times, and my grandfather molested me, and then a bunch of strange men,” she said.
Doubting her value in this world, Perkins ended up in several abusive relationships.
“I was with my children's father, and he used to take my welfare check," she said. "And one time, I just refused to give it to him, and so I ran into the bathroom and he busted the bathroom door open and I'm standing by the door, and he hit me so hard that I flew back into the bathtub. And just that one hit blacked both my eyes, busted my nose and my lip.”
Perkins knew she wanted to help other young kids avoid her fate.
“I became an at risk counselor because when I was growing up, no one asked me what was wrong? Why was I doing all these things in school?" she said. "Maybe I wouldn't have went through all of these things
She wanted to help the rest of the state.
“We went to the state Capitol to try to turn human trafficking into a violent and serious crime because it's a misdemeanor, and to me, I sat down with all these different senators,” Perkins said.
Domestic violence has the word violence in it, but California does not consider domestic violence a violent felony. It's the same story with human trafficking and rape of an unconscious woman.
Due to Prop 57, committing these crimes can mean shorter sentences and early releases. Voters were the ones who approved the measure back in 2016 at the request of then-Governor Jerry Brown who was trying to make up for decades of tough-on-crime policies.
Prop 57 lightened sentences for non-violent felonies, but the proposition did not specify which felonies would be deemed non-violent. Instead, it only listed 23 kinds of crimes that are considered violent.
Critics at the time said this would lead to early releases- and still argue- that they were right.
Perkins teamed up with Republican Senator Shannon Grove (R- Bakersfield) and other bi-partisan lawmakers to change the definition.
“We had several Democrat co-authors, but the individuals, the Democrat senators on the Public Safety Committee would not allow it to leave that committee," Grove said.
What’s the impact if something is not considered a violent felony?
“In California, it is not considered a violent felony to be convicted of domestic violence of inflicting a traumatic condition on an intimate partner, unless you inflict great bodily injury or use a weapon that could elevate the crime to a strike,” Dawn Bladet said.
Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Dawn Bladet said strangulation, for example, is not considered great bodily injury. She oversees the Sex Crimes and Family Violence Bureau.
“The act of really physically trying to take the breath or the life away of a victim shows a certain kind of mentality of the abuser," Bladet said, "and it's usually a predictor of whether that person is going to potentially commit deadly violence against their victim”
As a prosecutor, she says her hands are tied.
“You're gonna get many more credits, 50% credits on your sentence, when you are convicted of domestic violence because it's not considered a violent felony," she said. "So the sentencing range for general domestic violence (penal code section 270 3.5) is a two year, three year, or four year prison sentence. So that means at most, you could be serving, if convicted of simply that crime, half of that four years."
She said more often than not, the perpetrator is right back in jail.
“They're coming in for the second, third time with multiple domestic violence history of convictions,” she said.
The director of My Sister’s House, a domestic violence shelter, Yen Marshall, said this puts domestic violence survivors' lives at risk
“It definitely needs to change because in the second time might be too late already," Yen said. "By the first offense, she might have already been so badly hurt or been killed by them.”
If someone can hurt the person who loves them most, outgoing director of My Sister’s House Nilda Valmores says these offenders are capable of a lot more.
“The reality is we actually have had a domestic violence death every month since December here in Sacramento,” she said. "Oftentimes, mass shooters have some history of domestic violence in their background.”
Valmores points to the recent mass shootings in Sacramento alone: the church shooting, where David Fidel Mora-Rojas killed his 3 daughters on a supervised visit despite having an approved restraining order against him for domestic violence, or the K Street shooting, where multiple suspects have a criminal history of attacking their girlfriends and good credits got them out early.
Over 50% of mass shootings involve a domestic partner or someone with a history of domestic violence.
Perkins and Senator Shannon Grove said they are not going to back down. They will keep trying to work with lawmakers to help get this legislation through.
What was the original reasoning for it not passing?
Perkins, who participated throughout the legislative process, said that the big conversation was around overcrowding in the prison system. Some opposition groups also made it clear that they believed this would only harm survivors who are often times misidentified as the perpetrator.
Attorney General Rob Bonta's office sent a statement saying “Attorney General Bonta has been clear that he believes it would be appropriate for the legislature to discuss and potentially consider changing the definition of what constitutes a violent felony to include criminal acts such as rape of an unconscious person, human trafficking, or domestic violence.”
Directly with this statement, they sent a list of bills the attorney general supported this past year to help survivors, but none of them involved changing the definition.
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