A bill making its way through the New York State Legislature aims to close what its sponsors call a loophole that lets people buying sex from older teenagers escape proper punishment. The bill makes buying sex from a child 15 to 17 years old a felony. Buying sex from children younger than 15 is a felony but for older teens, it is only a misdemeanor.
Anti-sex trafficking advocates say the different treatment gives traffickers an incentive to target older teens and discourages police from spending scarce time to charge misdemeanor conduct.
The Victims Protection and Child Sex Buyer Accountability Act proposes to make buying sex from older teens a felony. Democratic State Senator Zellnor Myrie, a sponsor of the measure, pushed the act through its required committee, the Senate’s Codes Committee, in its first meeting of 2026, in January.
“Anyone that is looking to involve someone under 18 in commercial sex will face the appropriate consequences,” he said before the bill received unanimous support. It heads to the full Senate for a vote. The companion measure in the Assembly has not yet been voted on in committee.
“I believe it was 2017, New York State was the almost last state in the nation, I believe the 49th state, to recognize that a child should not have to testify to force fraud or coercion to prove that they were being trafficked,” said Becca Zipkin, Policy Director of World Without Exploitation, a coalition of anti-trafficking organizations. “But New York did make that change. And so now we feel this is the last change that needs to be made to New York state law to make sure that we are protecting children adequately."
“Right now, New York is the only state in the nation that under state law has a 15-year-old child being bought for sex as the same thing…as shoplifting,” Zipkin said.
Why has the law treated the crime of buying sex differently based on the age of the child? The issue is what experts call adultification: Believing older children are more mature than their age.
Erin Bates, Executive Director of the McMahon Ryan Child Advocacy Center in Syracuse, said this was a common perception when she began working with child trafficking victims.
“When I started back in 2013, I was working with minors that were 16, 17-years old, involved in work because they were coerced and were picked up on prostitution-related offenses and housed in jail, which is terrifying for anyone, but especially a 16 or a 17 year old who really has no life experience," Bates said.
Sex buyers “can throw their hands up and say, well, I didn't know she was a kid, she told me she was older,” said Melanie Thompson of New York City, who was kidnapped at age 12 and sold to men for sex. She escaped and was trafficked again when she was in foster care. Law enforcement at that time, she said, focused on arresting trafficking victims while giving buyers a slap on the wrist.
Thompson, of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International, said attitudes towards prostitution of minors has changed, with more attention being paid to counseling and supporting than arresting and jailing child trafficking victims. Also, police have been targeting traffickers more aggressively.
However, those efforts focus on the supply of children for sex. Closing the age loophole allows police to go more aggressively after the demand for paid sex with children by more severely punishing buyers.
“What we've seen all throughout the country is as soon as law enforcement is actually enforcing these laws, the demand goes down and, therefore, supply goes down,” said Zipkin. More child trafficking victims would be diverted to treatment instead of jail, said Bates: “You would see children being treated as victims from the start rather than them being processed and being charged and then having it changed later on in the courts.”
