Young French girls are falling prey to sex traffickers

These numbers are even more alarming, because in 2016, 35 percent of trafficking victims were of French nationality, compared to 61 percent in 2020. Teenagers used by pimps in French immigrant areas are now more likely to be young French girls.

The Ministerial Statistical Service for Internal Security revealed that sexual exploitation of French minor victims has increased since 2016 in the data recorded by the police and the gendarmerie by +21 percent and by the Justice Department by +83 percent in cases prosecuted for an offense involving at least one minor victim.

A report to the Minister of Health in July 2021 noted an explosion of immigrant neighborhood pimping, a “French specificity” according to the report. Overall, the prostitution of minors has increased by 70 percent and as a corollary of this expansion, pimping of French nationals has increased too.

In piloting the fight against the prostitution of minors, awareness and training, the improvement of identification and judicial treatment, the government had promised to act resolutely against this scourge. At the end of eight months of discussions, the working group on the prostitution of minors, set up by the Secretary of State for the protection of children, Adrien Taquet, had officially submitted his recommendations on July 13, to the Ministry of Health.

“It started in 2015, and quickly expanded in the large agglomerations of the territory.”  However,  “in 2020, more than 85 percent of underage victims of pimping were in immigrant areas,” explained a study of March 2021 done by the Information Service, Intelligence and Strategic Analysis on organized crime, cited in the report.

The underage victims of prostitution are currently not only young girls from the immigrant suburbs, warned the authors. “The vast majority are young girls, aged 15 to 17 on average, vulnerable, coming from all social backgrounds and who have difficulty in realizing their status as victims.”

A large number of them come from broken families and nearly half had already suffered violence during their childhood,  “mainly intrafamilial and/or sexual,”  according to French daily Le Monde.