StoryWhile the number of unaccompanied minors, often foreigners, continues to grow in the capital, this pediatric center in the 19th arrondissement is developing a monitoring and assistance strategy to try to remove them from the grip of drug and prostitution networks. .
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First there was the first. In the summer of 2016. A very small one. Overdose. And a second, a third … Then they began to flock by the dozen to the emergency rooms of the Parisian Robert-Debré hospital, the largest pediatric center in Ile-de-France. Foreigners under 18, who came to France alone and designated by the administration by the acronym MNA, “unaccompanied minor”, picked up in the surrounding neighborhoods by firefighters, unconscious or injured. Luigi Titomanlio, the emergency manager, remembers their condition when they arrived: “Poly-intoxicated”, “comatose” and sometimes “Very aggressive”.
Faced with this situation, emergency physicians seek the help of their child psychiatrist colleagues. Their leader, Professor Richard Delorme, then decided to give carte blanche, internally, to the team specializing in addictology for children and adolescents. “We had to imagine a new way of dealing with them”, tells the psychiatrist Emmanuelle Peyret, head of this unit. This one discovers “Children returned to the wild, who get high to endure the unbearable” and no longer trust anyone.
An educator, François-Henry Guillot, is mobilized, as well as a pediatric intern, Marie Parreillet. With Dr. Peyret, they become the main interlocutors of these some 200 patients, aged 9 to 18 – sometimes more. “They declare themselves to be minors, we take care of them as minors, recalls Marie Parreillet. Our mission is to fix these children, not to decide on their age. ”
“He was sucking his thumb while looking at Gulli”
This long-term work, which sometimes borders on mission impossible, confronts them with the realities of the world of unaccompanied minors. In mid-March, one of them lost consciousness in the middle of the street; he had swallowed six tablets of Lyrica, a powerful pain reliever. According to his papers, he was 15 years old. M. Guillot gives him four less. “He was very small”, he describes. In a fit of violence, he had to be tied up. He refused to speak to caregivers before admitting, lip service, living in “At a guy’s house in La Chapelle”.
In December 2020, another young person, entrusted to the social assistance for children (ASE) of Yvelines, had also been transported to the emergency room of Robert-Debré. His body was covered with raw wounds, and others, older ones. This that evening, François-Henry Guillot visited him in his room. “He was sucking his thumb while looking at Gulli”, remembers the educator. Then he ran away. No one has found his trace.
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