Islamists Targeting French Child Shelters to Radicalise Minors and Recruit Prostitutes: Report

Care homes for children in France have been infiltrated with Islamist networks which prey upon minors and often recruit them into prostitution, drug trafficking and terrorist cells, a report from a top lawyer and former magistrate warned.

Doctor of Law Manon Sieraczek and former investigating magistrate Thierry Froment said that under-funded and under-regulated government child protection facilities in France are key targets for radical Islamists, including those with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Le Figaro reports.

The pair said that judicial protection schemes for minors have effectively abandoned children. Seeking identity and social belonging, many minors in the system are vulnerable to “victim narratives” pushed on social media and subversive Muslims who enter into the system, often through outside Islamic associations.

The report cited testimony from two former residents of child care homes, who told the researchers that there was minimal supervision over those they came into contact with, how they used their phones, or where they went. They said that girls were “left to their own devices” and often recruited by pimps.

According to lawyer Michel Amas, there are around 20,000 children currently involved in prostitution, with many having been placed in child protection homes. He remarked that it represents a “pandemic that no one is talking about”.

Boys, on the other hand, frequently fell into organised drug gangs or joined terrorist groups. This has been particularly true for Syrian children imported by the French government as refugees, many of whom only speak Arabic, and with limited resources for interpreters, meaning that the authorities struggle to determine their mental state or if they are experiencing Islamist grooming.

A chief issue raised by the report was that care shelters are often treated as private homes rather than the government institutions they actually are, and therefore, are frequently not held to France’s strict standards on secularism.

This has meant that Islamist groups have been able to effectively infiltrate them and enforce strict Muslim standards on children, including banning young girls from swimming pools, forcing them to wear veils, and even Muslim Brotherhood-aligned figures leading organised prayers in the state-run child care homes.

Another issue the report raises is that child protection homes do not currently cooperate directly with French intelligence, focusing merely on education and prevention. Even still, only five per cent of such care homes have a standard protocol for dealing with radicalisation. With judges for child cases being overwhelmed, the report also found that 70 per cent of reported cases of radicalisation are dismissed with no action.

A specific organisation pointed to by the report was the child-focused Secours Islamique France (SIF), an NGO with alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Relief Worldwide, which has also been accused of being linked to the Brotherhood, allegations which it denies.

It comes in the wake of a major French government report on the decades-long plot by the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate national and EU institutions across Europe, in addition to control migrant Muslim communities through the deployment of trained radicals into key community positions, including in local sports groups, private education, employment assistance firms, and even Muslim dating websites.

This, the French government claimed, was intended to ensure that Muslim populations remained strict adherents of the faith and ultimately to wage a “Western conquest strategy” of imposing Sharia.

The efforts to radicalise Muslim youths have begun to have real-world consequences in France, with Islamist attacks increasingly being waged by teenagers, such as the anti-Semitic assault on Rabbi Emmanuel Engelberg in Orléans in March. A 16-year-old, with a previous history of drug dealing and other offences, was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

In another notable example, two teens were jailed in 2023 in Joué-lès-Tours after being found to have “tested homemade explosives” with the aim of demonstrating their loyalty to the so-called Islamic State.

Meanwhile, a study published last week in Germany found that over a million Muslims with a “migrant background”, which includes migrants and those with at least one foreign-born parent, had a mental state that would be susceptible to radicalisation.

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