SAN FRANCISCO—On Friday, January 8, Mayor London Breed announced new initiatives to fight human trafficking in the city, including at San Francisco International Airport (SFO). These new initiatives will be worked on by the SFO, the Department of Public Health, and the Department on the Status of Women.

Mayor Breed said that these initiatives will “advance our work to support survivors and end human trafficking in San Francisco” and said San Franciscans deserve “to feel safe and live without fear of exploitation,” in a news release.

SFO has put more than a thousand bathroom stalls in the airport’s “domestic and international terminals” with “multi-lingual signs” to urge individuals that they suspect being trafficked “to call or text” SFO’s hotline number “for immediate help and services from trained airport staff.”

Mayor Breed’s Task Force on Anti-Human Trafficking in 2019 discovered about “673 cases of human trafficking within the last two years reported to local service providers” with most of them being women of color from 18 to 24 years old.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says San Francisco is one of America’s highest “intensity areas for commercial sexual exploitation of children as related to human trafficking.”

If you or someone you know may be a victim of human trafficking victim contact:

  1. 911
  2. National Human Trafficking Resource Center: 1-888-373-7888
  3. San Francisco Collaborative Against Human Trafficking: https://www.sfcaht.org/by-category-of-service.html