traffickers recruit underage teenagers all over France
“It’s a reality on the ground that the police live here. Videos are broadcast on Snapchat and Tiktok where we see young people from Marseille with ticket connections, money, who explain what the ‘work’ consists of. This is how the small hands of traffic are recruited: watchmen or petty dealers. With artificial debts which they would have contracted, they would have been obliged to work for free. There are threats of reprisals, physical retaliation. They are used as commodities, “said Attorney General Dominique Laurens this Sunday morning on RTL.
This phenomenon is not new, but growing. In the summer of 2019, a 16-year-old teenager from Chartres was tortured with a blowtorch in a cellar in the 3rd arrondissement. He had been slightly injured in the arms and genitals. With the shootings that have multiplied over the past ten years, families in Marseille are now well aware of the risks and forbid their children to associate with traffickers, who therefore need to recruit from further and further away.
“We have parents hundreds of kilometers away who call for help every week from the northern neighborhoods police station to say that their child is ‘forced’ to sell drugs, who want us to extract him from this environment,” adds – she. “They are not destined to be traffickers, we need a positive counter-model for them to resume training”.
To fight against this phenomenon, Dominique Laurens, who has been a member of the Marseille public prosecutor’s office for two years, is calling for more resources, in particular for the Judicial Protection of Youth, for the associations and structures which work on a daily basis to prevent delinquency. It will also set up a special penal reparation measure for these adolescents, in conjunction with the Town Hall of Marseille.
On the ter-ter, the ground, we can see the same phenomenon. “Karim” and “Enzo” (the first names have been changed) aged 17, are currently in a closed educational center, the last stage before prison for minors caught on “stups points”. They explain why it is more interesting for a young person to come to Marseille as a dealer rather than stay in their home town. “Here, it sells more, there is a ‘coal’ (narcotics plan) every 500m, in each district. I know plenty of people who have come down from Paris, from Avignon… It pays better here. In Avignon , I took 100 euros a day to watch, here it’s 150, 180 euros… if they give you the bag to sell, it’s 300 euros a day. But there are some who are kidnapped, they don’t know anyone here, we force them to work for a month or two for free. And working lunch / midnight outside in the middle of winter, it’s hard. It’s not so easy money after all “.