“Black girls are being bought and sold in plain sight”
Nola Brantley discusses how systemic inequities, adultification and institutional failures leave Black and Brown girls vulnerable to trafficking. She identifies warning signs of grooming and calls for accountability, prevention and care rooted in trust. The post “Black girls are being bought and sold in plain sight” appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.
Black News 
A two-part conversation with Nola Brantley — of Nola Brantley Speaks and MISSSEY — on the causes and cures of sex trafficking in the San Francisco Bay Area
by Leah Harmony
With Nola’s first words, my thought is: “This woman knows her shit.” For two decades, Nola Brantley has worked with communities in the Bay Area to transform the response to sex trafficking.
Sex crimes and trafficking haven’t slowed down since the now-famous Epstein files were “released.” These abuses are often married to zero accountability. In August, police arrested San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York in a prostitution sting after he used an alias to arrange paid sex. York is no stranger to red and blue lights as a member of the DeBartolo family, who has been the subject of rumors surrounding organized-crime ties and federal investigations for decades. Yet law enforcement dropped the charges in each case. And, like a footnote in a never-ending saga of prominent offenders, this latest arrest is no exception. The authorities let Jed York go, allowing him to continue living his best life. They would like us to believe that the buying and selling of sex, and the trafficking of children, happens to no one, by no one.
The message is as clear as the billboards high above The Blade, the Bay Area’s most notorious corridor for sex trafficking. We’ve got to take matters into our own hands. Enter Nola.
In the following conversation, the co-founder of MISSSEY and founder of Nola Brantley Speaks discusses the conditions that make young people vulnerable, the failures of systems charged with protecting them, and what genuine safety, accountability and healing can look like for Black girls in the Bay Area.
being caught soliciting sex from an undercover officer he believed was a prostitute. He was charged only with disorderly conduct.
Leah Harmony: You began this work in 2001 and later helped build one of Alameda County’s first community case-management models for commercially sexually exploited children. What first made you understand that individual rescue was not enough — that the whole system had to change?
Nola Brantley: When I started this work in 2001, I quickly realized that what we called “rescue” was often happening at the end of a much longer story. Many of the young people I encountered were Black and Brown girls who had experienced abuse, foster-care involvement, family instability, homelessness or generational poverty before an exploiter ever entered the picture. And in Oakland, we can’t separate those conditions from the broader history of racial and economic inequity that has shaped many of the communities we serve. If we only remove a child from the street without changing the conditions that made her vulnerable, we’re not really changing her life — we’re interrupting one moment in a much larger cycle.
Leah Harmony: What exactly did you see that helped you understand exploited young people need support that police, courts, child welfare agencies and existing nonprofits were not providing?
Nola Brantley: I saw young people who had already been failed by multiple systems before they ever encountered an organization like MISSSEY. A girl might have been removed from her family, moved through multiple placements, experienced abuse or neglect, run away, become homeless and then encountered someone who offered her exactly what the systems around her had failed to provide — belonging, protection, money or what felt like family. And when many of those children come from communities that have already experienced generations of institutional inequity, we have to ask whether our systems are actually repairing harm or reproducing it.
Leah Harmony: What are some of the conditions that make Black girls in San Francisco, Oakland, Vallejo and surrounding Bay Area communities especially vulnerable to trafficking — and how do housing and inflation factor in?
Nola Brantley: We have to be careful not to suggest that being Black, Brown, poor or from Oakland somehow makes a child inherently vulnerable. The vulnerability comes from the conditions surrounding the child. Housing instability, inflation, poverty, family disruption, foster-care involvement, inadequate behavioral-health resources, school disengagement and a lack of safe places for young people to go can all increase vulnerability. And when those conditions are concentrated in communities that have historically experienced racial and economic exclusion, the impact becomes even more pronounced.
Leah Harmony: You have said that Black girls are being bought and sold in plain sight in Oakland. Why can the community see this but authorities can’t?
Nola Brantley: I don’t think authorities literally can’t see them. I think we’ve historically failed to see these girls as children deserving protection. Oakland has a large population of Black and Brown communities whose families have experienced generations of racial discrimination, economic exclusion, housing instability and unequal treatment by institutions. So when a Black or Brown girl is standing on International Boulevard, people can see the street and the behavior, but they don’t necessarily see the history, trauma, foster-care involvement, poverty or exploitation that may have brought her there.
Leah Harmony: What have you learned about the ways racism and adultification cause Black girls to be treated as willing participants, “fast,” troublesome or criminal instead of recognized as children experiencing abuse?
Nola Brantley: I’ve learned that Black girls are often denied childhood at exactly the moment they need adults to protect them most. Their survival behaviors can be interpreted as attitude, sexuality, defiance or criminality instead of trauma responses, and when a child also has a foster-care history or comes from poverty, those labels can compound each other.
In communities with a long history of racialized stereotypes and unequal treatment, those assumptions don’t exist in isolation — they can shape decisions made by schools, child welfare, law enforcement, health care providers and the courts. After training more than half a million professionals, I know that changing that lens requires more than diversity training — it requires changing how agencies make decisions about children.
Leah Harmony: In Oakland, International Boulevard is frequently named in conversations about exploitation. What patterns are you seeing elsewhere — in Vallejo, Richmond, San Francisco and online — that the community as a whole should recognize?
Nola Brantley: The geography changes, but the vulnerability doesn’t necessarily change. In Oakland, Vallejo, Richmond, San Francisco and online, young people may be navigating many of the same conditions — housing instability, family disruption, foster-care involvement, poverty, isolation, trauma and unmet needs — and exploiters know how to identify those vulnerabilities.
And we should remember that these communities are not simply “high-risk communities”; they are communities with enormous resilience that have also experienced historical disinvestment and discrimination. The street may look different, but the underlying equation is often the same: a young person needs something desperately, and someone else presents exploitation as the solution.
Leah Harmony: What should young people notice when a relationship begins to turn from affection into grooming?
Nola Brantley: Pay attention when someone starts asking you to keep secrets, isolates you from people who love you, makes you feel indebted, controls where you go or who you see, gives you things and then expects something in return, or tells you that nobody understands you the way they do. Grooming often doesn’t begin with something that feels dangerous — it can begin with attention, affection, validation, gifts or making you feel uniquely special. If a relationship increasingly requires secrecy, control or something in exchange for love, that’s a serious warning sign.
Leah Harmony: How have phones, social media and gaming platforms changed recruitment over the past 10 years — and how can the community combat the negatives?
Nola Brantley: Technology has dramatically expanded the access an exploiter can have to a young person. Grooming can happen privately, continuously and across platforms, sometimes before an adult in the child’s physical environment realizes anything is wrong. We need digital literacy, stronger platform accountability, adults who understand online behavior without simply spying or shaming children, and conversations about healthy relationships that begin before a child encounters a groomer.
Leah Harmony: What universal behavioral changes should parents, teachers and other adults take seriously that could save a child before the threat becomes embedded in the child’s life?
Nola Brantley: Don’t just look for a child suddenly standing on a street. Look much earlier. Chronic running away, placement disruptions, sudden homelessness, unexplained money or gifts, an older romantic partner, withdrawal from family, school disengagement, increased secrecy or a child suddenly becoming dependent on someone outside the family can all be opportunities to intervene before exploitation becomes deeply embedded. And particularly with Black and Brown children, adults have to be careful not to interpret survival behavior as simply defiance or criminality. The question should be, “What is happening to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?”
Leah Harmony: Can you describe a situation from your work that changed your understanding of what a young person needs before they can trust an adult offering help?
Nola Brantley: My own experience taught me that authority and safety are not synonymous. When the adult who is supposed to represent protection is also connected to your exploitation, it fundamentally changes how you understand trust. That’s why I learned that young people don’t owe us immediate trust; we have to earn it through consistency, transparency, respect and showing up when there is nothing in it for us. That is particularly important when working with young people whose families and communities may have legitimate reasons to distrust institutions based on generations of experience.
Leah Harmony: You have worked alongside law enforcement while also witnessing the misuse of authority. Do police interventions often help or hurt exploited youth?
Nola Brantley: They can do either. But when we’re talking about Black and Brown girls who may already have experienced poverty, foster care, trauma and institutional intervention, another authority figure showing up and treating them primarily as a problem can reinforce everything they’ve already learned about systems. My own experience with exploitation by a San Francisco police officer makes this question deeply personal for me: Authority is not automatically synonymous with safety.
Leah Harmony: If you could tell police, as a single entity, what they should not do — what standard practice absolutely does not help?
Nola Brantley: Don’t use the authority of a badge to exploit, intimidate, manipulate, control or silence a vulnerable young person. And don’t assume that because a child is Black, Brown, poor, homeless, in foster care or behaving in a way adults don’t understand, she is somehow less deserving of protection. I say that not only as a professional who has spent decades training systems, but as someone whose own exploitation involved a police officer. If you’re an officer, the power you carry should make a child safer — not make her more vulnerable.
To be continued …
Leah Harmony is manager of production at the San Francisco Bay View and can be reached at leah@sfbayview.com
If you or someone you know needs assistance or if you want more information, contact:
or Direct Support: directservices@misssey.org
Housing: housing@misssey.org
For more information on Nola Brantley Speaks, please visit nolabrantleyspeaks.org.
The post “Black girls are being bought and sold in plain sight” appeared first on San Francisco Bay View.
