Hakim wanted to make some money from drugs. He was raped. Mathieu, burned with a blowtorch. And Jules? Kidnaped. Three trials describe the unsustainable reality of young people who sell drugs in Marseille (southeast France), victims of “neighborhood justice.” This is a silent reality, since the victims, whose names were changed, barely speak.
Hakim, 15, showed up at the last minute to the trial of his alleged torturers, held behind closed doors at the end of September in Aix-en-Provence. “He had not heard from her for weeks, his bravery was remarkable,” said his lawyer, Stéphane Arnaud.
A few days before, Mathieu was stunned by his four executioners, sentenced to sentences of up to 25 years in prison for kidnapping him, torturing him and burning his genitals with a blowtorch in 2019.
The reason? Selling a few grams of drugs without network authorization in Felix Pyat, one of the largest neighborhoods in France’s second city. Since then, “I don’t do anything special, I go out rarely, I react strangely, I do meaningless things,” he explained.
Jules decided not to appear on September 13 at the Marseille correctional court. In May 2021, this then 14-year-old teenager – “a child” according to the president – was kidnapped one afternoon in the middle of the city.
Those responsible for a trading post accused him of taking merchandise, so they held him and beat him all night. The next day, forced to sell again to pay his debt, he desperately asked some police officers to take him away in handcuffs, “so that he would look like he was real.”
This 2023 is being a black year in Marseille, “a bloodbath” according to the authorities, with more than 40 deaths from drug-related violence.
“They tell us about settling scores, about deaths, about collateral victims, but we don’t hear much about this aspect. (…) These victims are still alive but they are destroyed inside,” said prosecutor Virginie Tavanti during her argument in the Jules case.
Hakim’s main attacker, who admitted having forced him to perform fellatio, was 17 years old at the time of the events.
The young man explained that he himself was exploited by the network, admitting, according to a judicial source, that normally “a slave does not hit a slave” because “they are all in the same bag.”
“It’s not that I don’t have empathy, but I’m in my bubble. (…) I’m not interested in what’s happening around me, the less I know the better,” said El-Kabir M’Saidie Ali, the convicted adult. in the Mathieu torture case. “Violence is increasing more and more, the people who traffic no longer have limits,” he later stated.
In the hallways of the court, in all these cases, a term begins to circulate: trafficking in human beings.
“If you read studies on human trafficking, you will see that it involves control, fear, secrecy, hypervigilance, physical and sexual trauma, and denial or minimization of danger on the part of the victims,” ??Laurence Bellon, head of the court of minors from Marseille until his recent retirement.
“Trafficking in human beings is a very specific criminal figure and, therefore, difficult to prosecute,” Dominique Laurens, Marseille prosecutor, stressed at the end of June.
“These adolescents are trapped in a process of repetition that we address only from the point of view of recidivism, when it is also a question of control and submission to very violent networks,” insisted Bellon, who advocates “removing them or even exfiltrating them.” ” quickly.
