Advocates launch campaign to get anti-trafficking bill on state ballot

Leah Albright-Byrd, a native San Franciscan who ran away from home at age 14 to escape a violent father, said she didn’t know she “was running into the arms of a trafficker.

“The trafficker told me, ‘You’re having sex anyway, you might as well get paid for it,’” said Albright-Byrd, who was trafficked in the Mission District, Las Vegas and online from the age of 14 to 18. “I was told, ‘Once a ho, always a ho,’ that that was my destiny.”

Now a college graduate and doctoral candidate who next month will celebrate her 10th year of freedom, Albright-Byrd says she is proud to call herself a survivor.

She spoke Wednesday at Jewish Family and Children’s Services in San Francisco, to kick off a campaign to get a new measure on the November ballot that would increase penalties against human traffickers in California. The campaign, launched on National Human Trafficking Awareness Day, requires 800,000 signatures to make it into the state ballot.

Read the complete story at New America Media.

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