Associations estimate the number of minors who are victims of procuring in France at around 10,000. Adrien Taquet, the Secretary of State in charge of children, must present Monday, November 15 a national plan to fight against the prostitution of minors.
To try to stem these practices, the fight against prostitution also involves raising awareness. For five years, clients who have been fined have been able to be offered internships by the courts. A day costs them 180 euros, so less than the fine that they can avoid and which can go up to 1,500 euros.
>> “Very quickly, they are caught in networks which steal their money”: the cycle of prostitution of minors
Direction Pontoise, in the Paris region, to attend one of these “client training courses” organized by the ARS95 association. We were able to interview some clients, once before the training, and once after. In the early morning, Julien and Nicolas [les prénoms ont été modifiés] explain to us how they approach this internship. “I feel a little ashamed to go here, says Julien. I apprehend it as a punishment. Everything I am going to tell me I already know. Excuse me for the term but it pisses me off. I still take out the money that I could have put elsewhere. These internships will never stop that. “
“I assume that I’m young. It happens to me on vacation, in a nightclub when you can’t get a girlfriend for the night and you have a little desire. I’m looking for the easy.”
“Maybe there is a shame behind it, the fear of the outside gaze”, Nicolas explains in turn. But according to him, he continues, a prostitute “It is someone who is voluntary, it is someone who does his job. Because it is a profession.”
The aim of the course is to bring the participants face to face with the reality of prostitution. It begins with the intervention of a gendarme. Cindy Roguet reminds them of the law, but it’s not just theoretical. The chief warrant officer works in the field and meets prostitutes. Obviously for her, Adrien Taquet’s plan is right. “We also warn them about an exponential phenomenon which is the prostitution of minors or young adults who started prostitution when they were minors, and it often affects them.”
“The fact that they are minors is something that is extremely serious for them. There are even some who associate it with pedophilia. When we have these words that come out in the camps, we tell ourselves that we have when even a click and awareness. “
Cindy Roguet, gendarmeto franceinfo
Another click: understand that prostitution is not the oldest profession in the world, and moreover not a profession at all. Mélissa Guyomar, from the ARS95 association, pushes logic to the end. “Can you imagine the training? she launches to the trainees. For all trades there is training and studies. Imagine tomorrow you are the father of a family, we offer your daughter to train herself to give blowjobs as part of a school course, because that is the logic of the profession. In prostitution you don’t play cards. A manual finishing CAP or a BEP fellatio … You see the absurdity of the thing? “
In fact, the key notion to deconstruct their vision of prostitution is that of consent. “The violence already resides in the act itself, that is, the act is not desired by the prostitute, if it was you would not have to pay. Is you agree on this principle? “, asks Mélissa Guyomar. “There are some who work for themselves, who want this money and who are willing”, answers one of the trainees.
Money = consent, a certainty that changes at the very end of this long day with the testimony of Rosen, who tells that she herself said that she was consenting when she was prostituting herself. One day, she realized that it had never been the case but that she did not have the weapons to understand it. Rosen was raped as a child by her uncle, then by a friend of her father, then by her future pimp: “He brings me men, women, couples and he tells me that love is that. The company where I work closes, so I lose my job, and I find myself in prostitution. 9 years old at my 32 years old, how do you identify suffering when you have lived through only suffering? “ Two thirds of prostitutes have suffered sexual violence before falling into prostitution.
At the end of the day, we find Julien, who spoke in the morning of “punishment” to qualify the internship. “There were things that I hadn’t seen because it’s so violent. So I don’t think I’m going to go back to this, at least not for a while. She was telling us to think it over and to do it. imagine if it is our sister, our mother or our daughter. “ And when asked if this internship, which he approached with skepticism in the morning, moved the lines, he replies that “yes, really a lot”.
“If I do this again, I’d rather think it’s me destroying and not her relieving me.”
His turnaround is quite impressive, but no one knows if these interns will really stop resorting to prostitution: there is no follow-up. And only a handful of clients of prostitutes follow this training in France. About fifteen public prosecutors currently offer it, and in Pontoise for example, there are around a hundred trainees per year.