Juvenile Justice Fund

A Future. Not A Past. Advocate Keisha Head shares her story with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution…

Child prostitution victim becomes role model
By Andria Simmons
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Keisha Head

In her role as counselor and mentor for young girls, Keisha Head is poised, polished and polite.

But she need only look in the mirror to be reminded of a troubled past. The name of her former pimp, “Sir Charles,” is literally branded across the top of her back in a dark, swirling script.

On a recent morning, the 31-year-old settled into a chair in a cheerfully decorated room at the Fulton County Juvenile Justice Center where she helps girls identified as being at risk for child sexual exploitation.

Head didn’t wait for questions before letting her life story unspool. It is a story of hitting bottom — hard — but then lifting herself above her past to become a positive role model.

Born to a schizophrenic single mother, Head was sent to live with a family member at age 4. The new home was far from a safe haven, though. She was sexually abused for the next eight years by two older male relatives.

By the time she was 12, Head was acting out so much that she was sent back to her mom. The situation was untenable from the start, with her mother wandering the streets at all hours and being committed several times to a state mental hospital.

Child protective services intervened when Head stopped going to school and placed her in emergency children’s shelter. For the next four years, she bounced among 42 foster or group homes. That is, when she wasn’t trying to run away.

At 16, she got pregnant and was so ill-equipped for motherhood that she gave custody of her newborn daughter to the father.

“After that I was very brokenhearted,” Head said. “I became very numb.”

Head was suicidal, dirty and hungry when she turned to a friend for help. Her friend said “I know somebody who can help you.”

That was the night she met “Sir Charles.” He seemed well-dressed, considerate, nice.

He set her up in his house with seven other girls who welcomed her like the family she never had.

He also told her that if she wanted to take care of herself, she needed to strip at a nightclub where several other of the girls worked. But that job lasted only three days before Sir Charles gave her a new task: prostitution.

He took her to Stewart Avenue (now Metropolitan Parkway) in downtown Atlanta and gave her a quota of $1,000 a night. If she didn’t comply, Sir Charles threatened to harm her daughter.

For the next six months, she wore high heels and skimpy outfits as she worked the corner of 14th Street and Crescent Avenue in Midtown, carefully following her pimp’s rules to avoid violent beatings.

During that period, Head said she was raped 15 to 20 times. Once, she was forced to jump from a car traveling 60 mph to escape from a john who tried to kidnap her.

“I saw a lot of girls getting in cars, and you never saw them again,” Head said. “I knew if I stayed on that track, I would die.”

To read the rest of Keisha’s story, please click here.