It’s the first time they’ve met. Samantha, 43, welcomes Rachel, 46 (their first names and those of their daughters have been changed to protect them), into her garden in Occitanie. They greet each other with three kisses. Samantha serves coffee, and the two women chat for a moment about everything and nothing. But they can’t avoid the subject that unites them for long: their daughters. Délia, Samantha’s, is 17; Victoire, Rachel’s, is 14. The former sleeps in the next room. The latter has been missing for six months. Both were recruited into pimping networks when they were still young teenagers and have only left them occasionally in recent years. As soon as they sit down, Samantha and Rachel both say it: ” It feels good to talk to someone who understands.”
Faced with this type of situation, parents like Samantha and Rachel often find themselves helpless, petrified by the shock of discovering that their child is being sexually exploited, ashamed of not having seen anything, and not knowing where to turn. It is often the mothers who lead the fight: first to save their daughter, then to treat her, understand her, and repair her. Associations estimate the number of sexually exploited minors at around ten thousand, the vast majority of whom are girls, and assume that this figure is still below reality.
Their number increased by 70% between 2015 and 2020, according to the report of a working group made up of associations, doctors and police officers, submitted in 2021 to Adrien Taquet, then Secretary of State for Children and Families.
The phenomenon has been promoted by social networks and today, most of the passes, called “plans”, are offered on the Internet. They take place in private places, hotel rooms or rented apartments. “The phenomenon is volatile, invisible. The ads appear on specialized sites but also on Vinted [sous la forme, par exemple, de “Vend jeune fille robe”]Leboncoin [avec notamment des offres de massage, même si le site reste vigilant et met des garde-fous] or the dark web, which makes counting even more complicated. And a single ad can be for multiple girls,” comments Sophie Antoine, legal officer of the association Acting against child prostitution (ACPE).
“Images I should never have seen”
It is Samantha’s sister, Delia’s aunt, who discovers the truth by searching through her niece’s phone one day in 2019. At the time, the 13-year-old teenager had been placed in a foster home for a few months, by decision of a juvenile judge, after running away and being violent against her mother. In the device, her aunt discovers photos and the ads that accompany them and immediately shows them to her sister. “Images I should never have seen,” Samantha sighs. She tries to trace the events: “I fled her father’s violence when she was very young, and we moved around a lot. She was an impressionable child, who had little self-confidence. When she was 12, 13, I was working a lot and I left her in her own world, with her phone.”
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