As Miss Pittsburgh, Bridgeville native promotes advocacy for survivors of assault

For Bridgeville native Madison Campbell, venturing into pageant competition was all about visibility.

“I believe that by sharing my story out there, hopefully it helps other people feel comfortable coming forward,” the 2014 Chartiers Valley High School graduate said.

Campbell is co-founder and CEO of Leda Health, an organization providing assistance to and advocating on behalf of those who have been sexually assaulted. And as the recently crowned Miss Pittsburgh 2023 in the United States of America Miss Pennsylvania pageant, she will compete for the state title in October.

Whatever the outcome, she welcomes the opportunity to provide her personal take on an unfortunately common occurrence.

“When I went off to college, I was a sexual assault survivor who didn’t report or get medical care or anything like that,” Campbell said. After she started relating her experience, she learned that other family members had similar stories, “and they never felt comfortable coming out and talking about it.”

Part of her work with Leda Health — launched in 2019 and named after a queen who, according to Greek mythology, was seduced by a disguised Zeus — is encouraging more survivors to speak up, with a goal of promoting changes within the legal system.

“The sexual assault conviction rate is less than 1%,” she said. “That is very harmful for survivors, because they feel like, why would I even move forward with the criminal justice system, because the likelihood of conviction is so low?”

She acknowledges other impediments.

“It’s not easy to report. It’s not easy to come forward to your parents,” Campbell said. “I think for me, I didn’t want my mom to be worried about me having gone to college far away, all the way to Massachusetts, but far enough away. I didn’t want her to worry about the fact that this happened to me when I was not under her roof and she couldn’t do anything about it.”

An early priority of Leda Health was to make at-home sexual assault kits available for survivors.

“We acknowledge the fact that most people might not feel comfortable going to the police or going to the hospital,” Campbell explained. “So can we help those people who were like me to seek care in a different way.”

Leda additionally offers emergency contraception, infection and toxicology testing, and educational programming for universities, businesses and governmental entities throughout the nation.

Now living in Lawrenceville, Campbell looks to strengthen her advocacy work in the Pittsburgh area.

“This is a community that matters to me. This is the community that I grew up in,” she said. “And it’s a community that I had no idea, growing up, had these problems until I was able to come back and was able to start talking to people and being more forthright.”

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Prevention, one out of every four American females — and, for that matter, one in 26 males — has experienced completed or attempted rape.

“Twenty-five percent of women? That’s insane,” Campbell said, and she has made finding solutions her life’s goal:

“Yeah, we might have been doing things the same way for the last 50 years. But for the next 50 years, we’ve got to think out of the box.”

For more information about Leda Health, visit www.leda.co.

The United States of America Miss Pennsylvania pageant is schedule for Oct. 21 and 22 in Malvern, Chester County. Details are at www.usoamisspennsylvania.com.