A metro Atlanta nonprofit organization called Gigi's House that offers safe shelter, counseling and education for sex trafficking victims is expanding its services with the help of donations from two Georgia district attorneys.

Clayton Judicial Circuit District Attorney Tracy Graham Lawson and Macon Judicial Circuit District Attorney David Cooke together are in the process of donating $350,000 to Gigi's House, they said Thursday. The donations are coming from money confiscated by law enforcement after arrests for drug dealing and commercial gambling.

“We both had a generous amount given to us from a forfeiture,” Lawson said Thursday as she drove from the coast back to Jonesboro following the Prosecuting Attorneys' Council of Georgia summer conference.

Lawson's office has already donated $50,000 to Gigi's House and is about to give $200,000 more for a total of a quarter-million dollars. She said most of the money came from drug dealer arrests in and around Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport, much of which is located in Clayton County. She combined that with forfeited funds from gambling arrests.

“I'm going to try to encourage other DAs if I hear of them having forfeiture funds,” Lawson said. “A lot of them don't have the blessing I have had in the amount because of the airport.”

Cooke said he learned about Gigi's House from Lawson. “When Tracy mentioned it, I leapt at the idea,” he said. Cooke's office donated $100,000 to Gigi's House from funds forfeited by commercial gambling operations.

Typically, forfeiture funds are used for specialized training, guns for investigators or bulletproof vests, Lawson and Cooke said. The reason forfeiture funds can be donated in this way is that Gigi's House provides services to make crime victims whole—and transportation to court to testify against their abusers. But the funds available can vary, as can the priorities from one DA to the next. So it's important for organizations like this to develop their own funding sources, they said.

Gigi's House logo (Courtesy photo)

“This is a fantastic organization, and that's not a good enough word,” Lawson said. “They take these 13- to 19-year-old girls that have just been through hell and give them a safe protective haven, counseling, classes, training. They each have their own room. It's a beautiful facility.”

Since opening in May 2018, Gigi's House has served 33 girls in its 18-month program. Girls aged 13-19 from any county in Georgia are eligible. Most clients are referred by law enforcement or the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services. Gigi's House is licensed by the state and works under contract with DFCS, according to founder and CEO Sabrina Crawford.

Crawford is a grandmother and a car dealer who saw the need and became inspired to start Gigi's House. She and her husband have a business partner who wrote a check for $600,000 to build the home. Their church, community groups and friends have embraced and supported the effort. Gigi's has a 10-member board of directors and a 22-member staff, including an executive director, two to three house managers on every shift, tutors and counselors. Operating expenses run $50,000 a month. Still, Gigi's only has space for 10 girls.

“We have to turn people away every day,” Crawford said. “It is so sad that the need is so great.”

Crawford said Georgia has four such shelters, but they have space for only 40 girls total. Gigi's is working to expand with new buildings to add 40 more rooms plus additional space for education and training. She said the girls are home-schooled. One is about to graduate and planning to attend college to become a nurse.

Part of the expansion plan is to create separate areas for girls who are new to the program until they can be provided with trauma informed therapy. Plans also include independent living areas for those over 18 to be provided support before they are truly on their own.

“We have six or seven girls that have been with us since we opened. They are doing so well,” Crawford said. But, she added, “every time you bring in a new girl, it disrupts the home.”

The youngest was 13 when she arrived.

“I have girls that have been raped 12 to 15 times a night,” Crawford said. “They were trafficked by parents, friends, boyfriends. The people they should have been able to trust are the ones that got them in the situation they're in.”

If law enforcement and state social workers have no options to place girls in facilities like this, they have to go into foster care—which by definition cannot provide the same level of services.

“Foster care has to send them to public school,” Crawford said. “They are trained to recruit other girls, so that puts the other students at risk. And their traffickers can just pick them up.”

Crawford said people ask her how the girls became vulnerable to kidnapping or manipulation by sex traffickers. In addition to the obvious risks—a parent in prison or drug addicted, sexual abuse in the home, running away or being thrown out—she tells them one more.

“The one common denominator is they're looking for love. These men provide that false love. They can compliment them, tell them how beautiful they are, tell them they love them,” Crawford said. “They fall for it because they want that so badly.”

Asked why she named the home Gigi's, Crawford said, “My grandkids call me that.”

She added, “Who doesn't want to go to Grandma's house, where they feel safe and loved? We want to show them how much we love them, that they're safe and their past is not defining them.”