Lisa Williams Rescues Atlanta’s Lost and Forgotten

By Nichole Bazemore –

Lisa Williams remembers the first girl who walked through the door of this house, nestled snugly in the hills of a sleepy Georgia town. The 13 year-old, handcuffed and wearing leg shackles, had been arrested for child prostitution. Young, bound, and helpless, the “baby,” as Williams calls her, was a painfully real example of something that, until that moment, she had only read about.

Years earlier, in 2004, Williams had read about two other girls just like this one in an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Selling Atlanta’s Children” profiled the commercial sexual exploitation of two sisters – one ten and one eleven years of age. Both the article and photo still haunt Williams today. “There was a photo of the girl from the knees down; she was in orange flip-flops and shackles—a ten year-old girl. She was waiting to go before the judge. Her eleven year-old sister was scheduled to go before the judge next.”
Photo by Marie Thomas

Each year, an estimated 300,000 American girls–some as young as nine years old–are sold into the commercial sex trade. This isn’t just happening overseas; it’s happening in our neighborhoods, sometimes right next door. Lisa Williams, Director of Living Water for Girls, an organization in Atlanta, GA, has made it her life’s mission to do something about it. Read more about Lisa’s story and her important work in this story, originally published in Fayette Woman Magazine.