Chrystul Kizer was a victim of sexual abuse. Our system failed her

Sexually abused young women are often not seen as victims in unspeakable situations, but as ‘prostitutes’ who sell their bodies.

Diane L. Rosenfeld
| Special to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Like many who have advocated for Chrystul Kizer, I am shocked by the harsh sentence the judge imposed in the death of Randall Volar III, who had been sex trafficking her since she was 16. Under Wisconsin’s truthful sentencing law, that’s a 16-year sentence; 11 years incarceration and five years of supervision. Kenosha County Judge David Wilk would give her about two years in prison, so she would likely be released in nine years at age 33.

For me, this is a law and order issue. The U.S. Department of Justice was actively working on the first Trafficking Victims Protection Act when I was Senior Counsel in the Office of Violence Against Women in the late 1990s. Understanding the plight of trafficking victims is not a new concept.

And when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that a safe harbor provision for victims of child sexual exploitation would be available to Kizer’s defense, the ruling joined a growing legal sense that victims should not be treated as criminals for actions that are a direct result of their abuse. The context of coercive control must be taken into account, because it can otherwise explain or excuse criminal behavior.

While both the judge and prosecutor Michael Graveley claim they took into account Kizer’s status as a victim of Volar, this belies the relentless prosecution of her as a criminal and the severe sentence imposed on her.

DA considers Kizer a prostitute, not a victim of sexual exploitation

The significance of Kizer’s refusal to acknowledge her precarious situation shaped the prosecution’s case. The prosecutor specifically treated her as a “prostitute” rather than a trafficking victim who killed her “john” to steal his car or perhaps for notoriety. The defense’s evidence showed that she was an impoverished but talented violinist who was sexually exploited by a man twice her age when she met him on Backpage.com, where she tried to get money for snacks and school.

These are the competing stories in the case. But the law requires a deeper understanding of the dynamics between a trafficking victim and her abuser. The laws are meant to protect prostituted women and girls, not those who would exploit them.

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We know that three months before Volar’s death, police had seized extensive evidence that he had sexually abused, trafficked, and filmed approximately a dozen underage girls, including Kizer. She was identified in the videos. Police were led to Volar after a 15-year-old girl called 911 from his home reporting that he had drugged her and threatened to kill her. She was found half-naked on the street one night in February. Strikingly, the police report described the girl as “prostituting herself,” even though she reported extreme, life-threatening victimization.

Likewise, in court documents, the state would only admit that Volar “acted like a customer, or what we used to call a john.”

The case is a failure of law enforcement and represents victim blaming

There is a significant legal difference between being a “john” and being the operator of a child sex trafficking ring involving approximately a dozen young girls, some of whom may have been as young as 12. Volar was no simple john, and to ignore the context of her victimization as part of this ring is incomprehensible. Perhaps the state retroactively diminished Volar’s criminality to create the narrative that Kizer was the reprehensible criminal, not Volar.

This attitude of viewing young women as ‘prostituting themselves’ may have infected the whole horrible business. From the beginning, sexually abused young women were not seen as victims in unspeakable situations, but rather as ‘prostitutes’ who sold their own bodies to men who would pay them.

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This misconception may help explain how Kizer was charged with disorderly conduct after she called 911 for help in a domestic violence situation in January of this year. She reported that the man she was with was trying to rape her. She discovered that he was a convicted child molester, but he had lied to her about it. One wonders whether she became “disorderly conduct” because she was in extreme fear and felt that the police weren’t listening to her.

The judge and prosecutor should not have ignored the meaning of the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in the way they did. Kizer and all others in a similar situation deserve better under Wisconsin law. Going forward, the public must demand better.

Diane L. Rosenfeld is a professor of law and founder of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School. She is also the author of The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliance.