Italian police arrested a mother and her daughter on charges of inducing child prostitution after the pair allegedly forced the woman’s other daughter, said to be 15 years old, into prostitution in order to pay off debts.
The woman and her daughter were arrested earlier this week by carabinieri officers in Palermo who also carried out precautionary orders against six suspects in total for exploitation and along with aiding and abetting prostitution and sexual acts with minors.
The arrests came after an investigation that began in august of last year when officials intercepted telephone communications indicating the existence of a prostitution ring and found that the 15-year-old had been forced to engage in prostitution by her mother and sister along with her mother’s boyfriend, who organised meetings with those paying to abuse the teen, the newspaper Il Giornale reports.
The wiretaps also revealed conversations between the mother and others and showed the woman was exploiting her daughter in order to pay expenses and debts, while the sister of the victim was caught demanding money from some of the abusers.
Both daughters had been transferred out of the mother’s custody in 2018 by a court but the eldest had recently returned to live with her mother, while the 15-year-old only visited on weekends, and during one of the visits is when the mother allegedly proposed to her daughter that she should become a prostitute.
The case comes just months after the head of another child prostitution ring in Spain was accused of exploiting his own daughter while presenting her as an adult on sexual websites. The man was just one of 37 different people arrested by Spanish authorities in connection to the network, which included people from a variety of backgrounds from Moroccans and Cubans to Nigerians and Romanians.