A conference committee of state lawmakers passed House Bill 1926 Thursday to plug the legal loophole that lets police have sex with prostitutes.

“We are very happy that the conference committee passed HB 1926,” Pacific Alliance to Stop Slavery Executive Director Kathryn Xian said in a statement after the vote. “We’ve long struggled to protect Hawaii’s trafficking survivors and today we took a step forward in bending the arc of justice toward victims of the world’s oldest oppression.”

The committee, chaired by Rep. Karl Rhoads and Sen. Clayton Hee, also reached agreement on House Bill 1750 to combat revenge porn. 

“Revenge porn is the worst form of cyber-bullying, it is an online form of sexual exploitation and abuse,” Cyber Civil Rights Initiative founder Holly Jacobs said in a statement. “It leads to serious psychological conditions, gets victims fired from jobs, makes it difficult to find jobs, and can wreak havoc on relationships with friends and family. Furthermore, the threat of revenge porn is often used as a means of controlling a victim’s behavior offline: forcing them to stay in an abusive relationship, to have sex against their will, to stay in the sex trade.”

The non-partisan IMUAlliance, which co-authored the bill, launched a website — www.endrevengepornhawaii.com — to spread awareness. 

Vice Speaker John Mizuno applauded Hee and Rhoads for passing the bill to make it a crime to distribute, transmit or display photos, images or videos of sexual representation or nude photos without the consent of the person represented. 

“With technology comes different crimes, today our Judiciary conferees passed a very important and progressive bill to address a gap in the law and criminalize such offensive crimes,” Mizuno said in a statement.

The two measures will go before the full House and Senate for final approval next week.

Read past Civil Beat coverage of the prostitution bill here, and check out our past stories on revenge porn here.

— Nathan Eagle

Photo: Sen. Clayton Hee and Rep. Karl Rhoads iron out details of proposed legislation after conference committee hearing, April 21, 2014. (PF Bentley/Civil Beat)