The phone barely rings when Mathilde Rodriguez has already picked up. At the end of the line, Léna’s breathing (all first names have been changed) quickens with anger. In her hoarse voice, she unpacks Paris, the Airbnb where she lives, the prostitution she practices on a chain basis under the control of another woman: “The girl takes all my money. I’m killing customers, I can’t take it anymore. » In the room, the twilight light makes the exchange dramatic. “Do you have a lot of customers at the moment? », Mathilde Rodriguez asks calmly. “Yes, it’s too much, I can’t take it anymore. » “If you want to come back to Perpignan, Léna, you know you can, we are worried about you”continues the social worker. “OK, OK, I have to earn enough to pay for the ticket and I’ll arrive”replies the young woman. “But Mathilde, I can’t stay on the phone there, I have to hide it, can we talk via messages? » “We are really worried about you, keep us informed”finishes the educator, in the void.
Mathilde Rodriguez would like to be able to pay Léna a train ticket to the Pyrénées-Orientales, help her find emergency accommodation and consider something other than these forced sexual performances. “We don’t have the budget for that, Léna will have to make more passes if she wants to escape”, she regrets.
These two minutes of conversation, at the heart of the violence of teenage prostitution, remain suspended in the room. Around the table, Mathilde Rodriguez, Renaud Tarrius, the nurse, and Carla Daguenet, the psychologist, stir their end-of-day coffee, disappointed. The three members of the Intermède system, launched in the winter of 2022-2023 by the association for the protection of minors L’Enfance Catalane, do not have time to be saddened: soon, they will have to film a good part of the evening in the streets of Perpignan, where a third of the inhabitants live below the poverty line. They are the last night watchmen of the girls lost this city.
Difficult to spot
Interlude – “that which temporarily interrupts an activity”according to the dictionary – is a protocol unique and innovative in France which aims to prevent and fight against endemic crime, that of the sexual exploitation of adolescent girls.
In one year of existence, the team has already supported forty girls and two boys, half of whom are between 12 and 15 years old. Mathilde Rodriguez scrolls through the first names in her spreadsheet: Emma, Sasha, Romy, Léa, Léna, Iris… Nineteen of them are or have been runaways, a quarter still live with their family, almost all single-parent families. The vast majority of them are out of school, under educational measures and were victims of sexual violence in childhood, committed within the family or by an acquaintance. “We didn’t expect to have this much success and such a level of distress”explains Renaud Tarrius, a caregiver who is experienced in intensive care services in the midst of the crisis linked to Covid-19, and in supporting serious drug addicts.
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