2024-02-01 16:29:25
MISCELLANEOUS FACTS – On January 8 and 9, 2024, eight young men were sentenced by the Paris criminal court to sentences ranging from 18 months suspended to 6 years in prison for aggravated pimping. The victims were minors. The association Act Against Child Prostitution (ACPE), civil party to the trial, underlines the extreme youth of the condemned “then minors for the majority of the offenses, justifying the referral to the juvenile court before which they will be judged at a later stage.” The prostitution of minors by other minors is not a new phenomenon, but it has experienced a worrying increase since the beginning of the 21st century.
Prostitution of minors is described as “a global societal phenomenon which worries all professionals in the child protection sector” by the Scelles Foundation, which devoted itsFoundation notebook of June 2021, entitled “Minor pimps”, to the analysis of “pimping in cities” . The Foundation highlights the youth of pimps and notes, among them, a growing number of minors.
Drug traffickers converted to sex trafficking
The minor pimp is generally a teenager who has been confronted with violence that has passed under the radar of institutions and from which he has not been protected. He previously had a delinquent background. These are more rarely girls, often themselves prostitutes and who play the role of recruiters, sometimes precisely to escape their own prostitution.
Legal professionals explain that among these young pimps we find in particular former drug traffickers “reconverted” to the sex trafficking of young girls in their neighborhood, seeing it as an easier and less risky way to earn money. .
“Sexually exploiting minors is less costly to implement than drug trafficking, which requires the purchase of raw materials, storage capacity and the construction of human supply and distribution networks while avoiding controls of the police and the jealousies of rival clans. In addition, pimps run little risk of being prosecuted for acts of pimping,” explains the Scelles Foundation, which draws on research carried out by the association Agir Contre la Prostitution des Enfants (ACPE).
Minor pimps massively use social networks to develop their activity. There they identify their victims who are young girls who are vulnerable due to difficult social situations. They seduce them before delivering them to prostitution. For the latter case, the term “lover boy” appeared. They use the same networks to serve ads and find customers.
“Protectors”
The Scelles Foundation underlines that the difficulty of monitoring these social networks reduces the risks of being detected by the justice system while the current priority given to the fight against drug trafficking increases them.
It is striking to note that these young criminals rarely recognize themselves for what they are, pimps, and prefer to call themselves “protectors”.
However, the methods of recruiting young girls can be very violent. Some do not hesitate to lead them into traps, inviting them, for example, to a so-called party, where they will be drugged and then forced to perform commercial sexual acts. Sex tapes (videos showing sexual acts) featuring the victims may be made, who will then be threatened with distribution on the Internet. Sometimes it is girls who will be responsible for trapping their friends and throwing them into the clutches of pimps.
The trial of January 8 and 9 reveals an emblematic case. The victims were spotted on social networks in 2021, and they were all going through great family and/or social difficulties. The ACPE denounces the conditions of exploitation “particularly inhumane” of which four young girls testified:“a ‘line job’ with sometimes around twenty customers a day, rapes, lack of hygiene and immense exhaustion.”
Young human traffickers struggle to realize the harm they cause to their victims, and that was the case in this case.
One of the accused, placed in pre-trial detention, did not hesitate to continue to manage the exploitation of young prostitutes from his prison, after having managed to obtain a mobile phone. Proof that his arrest did not raise any salutary awareness.
“The young age of the perpetrators is a reminder of the urgency of raising awareness among the youngest, both to guard against possible future victims, and to raise awareness among possible future perpetrators who had not taken the measure, we “We saw during this trial the seriousness of their actions”, comments the president of the ACPE, Armelle Le Bigot-Macaux, in a press release.
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