“300 to 400 online ads in Toulouse alone”: Prostitution, fewer girls on the sidewalks but more and more on the Internet

When the members of a team of pimps using muscular methods heard the sentences handed down by the Bordeaux criminal court at the end of November, many showed bad faces. Nine years for the designated leader, seven years of detention for his deputies, heavy prison sentences, often placed above those requested during the indictment.

Since then, defense lawyers have filed an appeal without promising a better fate to their clients. At the Toulouse central police station, where this team was monitored and then arrested at the end of 2022, the police appreciated “having worked well”. And above all stopped people who, every evening, transformed the sidewalks of Boulevard des Minimes into a hotbed of prostitution.

Outward thrusts

“A horror” remembers a resident when one of his neighbors does not say he is completely reassured about the current improvement. “Every morning, I continue to progress among users’ condoms and sanitary napkins in every corner,” reproaches this resident of the Raisins district, in Toulouse.

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At the end of the week, “there are between five and ten girls in this area, sometimes less”, warns a police officer. Two years earlier, during the “heyday” of the Bulgarian clan, around fifteen women shared this part of the city center under the constraint of their pimps. And two or three times more from the time when girls from the East offered themselves in the area of ​​Boulevard de Suisse.

The anti-prostitution decrees issued by the city and the strengthening of controls have gradually pushed sex workers out of the center of Toulouse. “In Fondeyre, north of Toulouse, we still meet a lot of girls,” admits a police officer. Toulouse municipal police officers remain vigilant in the Barrière de Paris sector to avoid a descent towards the top of Avenue des Minimes.

“Today we are seeing the development of prostitution via the Internet and social networks. This is not new but it is progressing significantly, particularly since the Covid crisis,” confides a Toulouse police officer. A simple click on the Sexmodel website is enough to understand the extent of the phenomenon: 300 to 400 advertisements for “winners” are online in Toulouse. Girls, often foreigners, who tour France to seduce clients and escape controls. Do they work for them? Some succeed, many remain under the authority of pimps hungry for easy money.

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Benefits that excite the desire of more and more minors. “They leave homes, often running away and breaking up with their families. Some are taken in charge by boys who play lovers but are mainly interested in the money they bring in,” confides a worried police officer. A phenomenon that started in the Parisian suburbs and which continues to develop. And Toulouse is not immune to this prostitution as evidenced by various investigations and again the arrest, last week in a hotel, of two minors aged 15 and 16 and a 19 year old boy suspected of monitoring them very closely. not just for their smile.