Father fumes at 'police inaction' against his 16-year-old stepdaughter's pimp

A magistrate has heard a taxi driver express his incomprehension at how the police were failing to prosecute a 32 year old man, who he says is selling his partner’s tearaway 16-year-old daughter into prostitution. 

The man, who is accused of threatening the 16-year-old girl with a knife, took to the witness stand this afternoon, telling magistrate Aaron Bugeja how he had realised that the girl was being sold into sex work after finding several messages from men on a mobile which the girl had borrowed. 

The girl been reported missing after an argument at home, during which she claims the accused held a knife to her throat. 

But today the accused said that during the argument, the girl had said she would kill him so he had retrieved the knife from the kitchen, placed it on the bed and told her to go ahead. 

“I call the police station every day, telling them where the pimp is and her mother goes there in person, but they never take action” said the accused. “On one occasion, the policeman I was speaking to hung up on me.” 

He was baffled by the police’s inaction, he said. “I was calling the vice squad every day during the 6 days when she was missing. I told them that he would be at the detox centre.” 

Inspector Jeanne Farrugia from Msida police station testified that when the girl had made her report at the station, she had said that her mother’s partner would constantly badger her about her choice of company and that she was not happy about it because he “was not her father.” The girl refused to be medically examined. 

The girl, who is currently living in a shelter for victims of domestic violence, told the court today that she had fought with her mother over the girl’s wish to live with her pimp-cum-boyfriend and the accused had interfered. She claimed that the man wanted to control her life and and that she was afraid of him because he would beat her mother. 

But the court also heard the girl’s mother testify today. She said she did not approve of the girl’s relationship with the 32 year old man, who she said would sell the girl into prostitution. During an argument with the accused, the girl had told her that if she were to stab him, she would get away with it because she was a minor. 

“I swear to you that neither of them touched the knife, he just placed it on the bed,” said the woman. 

The magistrate pointed out that the daughter had just testified that the accused had grabbed her by the neck and put a knife against her throat. “Do you think I’d let him do this to her?” she replied. 

The court pointed out that the girl had alleged that the accused would threaten the mother. The mother said that she had never been threatened, not even by her drug addict ex-partner.

She explained that the argument had started when the girl snatched her mother’s mobile phone and went into the bedroom. The accused had gone in to take it back. The girl had spewed a stream of foul language at him and his deceased mother. It was at that point that the man went into the kitchen and brought back a knife, placed it on the bed and told her to stab him, said the woman. 

“She didn’t pick up the knife and neither did he.” 

“She has tired me out mentally. I cannot take any more,” said the parent. Before her 16th birthday, the girl had broken up with a previous boyfriend, who the mother said, she would take drugs with. “I refused to let him in the house again after I caught them in bed.” 

Some days later, the girl had showed her mother a picture of her new boyfriend. The woman told the court that she recognised him as a known drug addict and pimp, adding that on one occasion when the girl and her boyfriend had been arrested at his flat, her birth father - himself a drug addict, had been ashamed of how she was dressed like a prostitute. 

She said the police were in possession of Facebook chats where the girl was selling her body for €20 at a time and that she was informed that the 32-year old would sell her on the streets of Marsa in the summer. “I don’t now how the police have not sent for him when they know he is prostituting her.” 

She had written to the commissioner of police, asking him why proceedings have not been instituted against the pimp, she said. 

The court will continue to hear the case next week.