Teaching them anti-pimp 101

They prowl homeless shelters and shopping malls. They pose as photographers and talent scouts. They pop up on Internet chat rooms and teenage telephone party lines, searching for unsettled young girls they can convert into stony prostitutes.

Pimps may be the overlords of the world's oldest profession, but those familiar with the life say they operate here with 21st-century sophistication.

''It's very calculated," a 44-year-old career planner from Roxbury, who did not want to be identified by name, said last week. His former career, from the '70s into the '90s, was as a Cadillac-driving Boston pimp who used the street name Zeus and recruited troubled women at bus stations with the line: ''Listen, you're worth a million bucks. I want you to be a star."

Now, in an experimental venture that gained urgency earlier this month when a prostitute was found dead in Roxbury, outreach workers have been teaching vulnerable girls in the Boston area to be on the lookout themselves: You know those all-too-friendly men who rush in to give you a warm bed or a new wardrobe? They might make you pay them back by putting you in their stable of sex workers.

''A pimp doesn't walk up to you and tell you all the bad stuff they're going to do; they give you all the good stuff," said Denise Williams, 43, an ex-prostitute. Desperate at 13 to hear the words ''I love you," she said, she was sweet-talked out of a Southern town by an older man who forced her to work as a prostitute. He once grabbed her so hard by the throat that he lifted her off the ground.

Williams is co-author and one of the presenters of the new anti-pimp curriculum, ''My Life, My Choice: The Massachusetts Prostitution Prevention Project." Some 40 girls ages 13 to 19 have completed the 10-week street-smart seminar. Largely in the custody of the state Department of Social Services, and living in residential homes in and out of Boston, they are truants, runaways, victims of sexual and physical abuse. In other words: prey for pimps.

''That's prime right there," said Zeus. ''A pimp has a lot of money. They have flash. A lot of young girls want that. It builds their self-esteem." But in the prevention project, girls are taught that the man making big promises isn't the mink-swathed sugar daddy of music videos and websites.

''The pimp-prostitution relationship is an extreme form of domestic violence," said Lisa Goldblatt Grace, 35, a social worker who co-wrote the curriculum and presents it alongside Williams, helped by ex-players like Zeus.

The course is not mandatory, according to the state, but is taught to selected at-risk girls in four group homes overseen by DSS. It uses old-school self-esteem building, honesty-honing journal writing, and role-playing to give the girls a modern outlook they may never have contemplated: The real world of prostitutes enslaved by drugs and pimps is far from the life of skin glamorized by MTV's ''Real World."

For those who do get sucked into selling sex and find themselves in dangerous situations, the curriculum provides tips on how to stall, such as feigning sickness or making themselves throw up.

Williams estimates there are 10 to 15 pimps working in Boston, from the professionals downtown who are wired into the national circuit to the local dressed-down ''sneaker pimps" of Blue Hill Avenue. Police agree with that number but say it's hard to crack down on them because the women are afraid of reprisals. ''It is a tough case to prove because we need the women to testify," Boston police spokeswoman Mariellen Burns wrote in an e-mail response.

As Zeus tells the girls, he used hard tactics to keep the money flowing to him from the half-dozen women in his employ: ''A slap, a paddle . . . "

As part of the endeavor, launched last March with $60,000 from The Home for Little Wanderers after a teenage prostitute in state care was murdered, Williams and Grace are also training DSS workers and others who deal with adolescents to detect danger signs: Is a girl keeping crazy hours with a new, older ''boyfriend" who outfits her in jewels?

With survey responses indicating that the course helped the girls see through pimp-recruitment techniques, the initiative's backers hope to expand it into schools and other venues, if funding permits.

On Feb. 6, the anti-pimp pedagogy got a gut-check: Charisse Carter, a 35-year-old Roxbury woman with a history of arrests for drugs and prostitution, was found fatally shot inside a Waverly Street entranceway. Around that time, Williams received word that a blond teenage prostitute who matriculated through ''My Life, My Choice," had just gone AWOL from her residential home, and may have returned to the streets.

Williams knew both of them, the slain veteran streetwalker and the rookie on the run. And as their paths crossed in her mind, she said, she shuddered thinking that they had each felt the same kind of dread that had rippled through her back in the day when a john had threatened her with a gun. She had run for safety, but first grabbed her day's earnings so her pimp wouldn't attack her, too.

''It made me think how deathly afraid they were," said Williams, who directs the Bandeli Team, which provides prostitutes with everything from condoms to crack-cocaine detox referrals.

Zeus said the AWOL was not a repudiation of the course as much as a testament to the tug of the street. ''It's hard to break," he said.

But Zeus and other presenters said they must try to add a fourth R to the traditional three of reading, writing, and 'rithmetic: rebuffing men who show an unhealthy interest in the kind of girl who, for example, says she wants relief from kids at school picking on her for being overweight. ''This curriculum is . . . powerful," Zeus said. ''It can work."

How do pimps recruit women and ''turn them out?" the curriculum asks.

Force . . . Coercion . . . Befriending . . . Seduction: Anna, age 14, ran away from home due to a bad situation with her mother. She met Louis, a much older man, through friends of friends. She told Louis how bad things were at home and he took her in. He fed her, bought her clothes, gave her money, and set her up in his apartment. . . . Anna felt like she had finally met someone who really cared about her. Louis gave Anna a job answering phones for his ''Escort Agency." One night, Louis said that one of his ''escorts" didn't show up for a date and that his whole business would fall apart. He asked if she'd do him one favor to go out on this date. . . .

Adults who know the blond-haired runaway say they fear she may have ended up in the grip of such a pimp, drugged up and selling sex in the South Boston area. But Williams, who went straight after 20 years in and out of prostitution, says she knows the girl can go home again.

Once a ho, always a ho: true or false? the curriculum asks. False: You can get out of the life. It isn't easy and it comes with a lot of rough times, but you can do it. You can build a better life for yourself, whether you've done this once, one hundred times, or one thousand times.