France Bleu Normandie gives you the testimony of Véronique Lebas, mother of Juliette victim of harassment in her former college / high school Marcel Gambier in Lisieux. The 15-year-old ended her life in 2016. More than a week after the trial, she looks back on the unbearable audience in the face of his daughter’s stalkers.
Reminder of the facts
At the time, the teenager couldn’t stand the massive dissemination of photos of her naked on the social networks Snapchat and Messenger. Six years later, the hearing of October 10, 2022 took place behind closed doors in order to preserve the anonymity of the minors questioned.
Five of the six defendants being, in fact, minors at the time of the events, they were sentenced to 2, 3 and 4 months in prison, suspended. They are three women and two men. The last defendant, an adult at the time of the events, has not yet been tried (he will be tried by the Lisieux Correctional Court on 17 January next at 1:30 p.m., in a public hearing) so that at this stage he benefits from the presumption of innocence.
Did you get the answers you expected?
Véronique Lebas: “Some yes. We wanted to know Juliette’s role in all this. And in fact, we had a positive response. Apart from the personal photos she had taken for a boy, she had threatened these young people to defend herself, but never published any document. She always remained very correct. It was a difficult hearing for us, but necessary for us to move forward because it’s complicated. And yes, we learned a lot many things, both positive and negative, but our daughter still suffered. When you hear that there are people who said “we’re going to fuck her, we’re going to lower her to earth, we’re going to rot her”, it’s hard.
There’s even someone who went so far as to say even dead, she still causes us problems
Me, their problem, I don’t care. Me, I no longer have my daughter. It’s complicated every day for his brothers, his grandparents. For parents, it is even more difficult. Also for families.”
What do you think of the convictions?
“There is a recognition of justice that says here is your daughter died because of this and these people are guilty. One of them appealed. We do not see it very well because we wondering when it’s going to stop? Besides, previous auditions have shown that this student was not all white either. We are therefore happy that their guilt, their implication in the death of Juliette has been recognized by justice.”
Today, your fight is preventive, you want to make other families aware of school bullying
“Three years ago, I went back to the college where Juliette was. I did it because there are still a lot of people, a lot of young people who are being bullied.
Besides, I hallucinated when I went to college because out of classes of 25 to 30 kids, there are at least ten who are harassed and who come to see you at the exit crying
It’s still a phenomenon that is growing a lot and parents have to tell themselves that: yes, they can have a child who is harassed, but they may very well also have a bullying child. It’s true that if I hadn’t lost my daughter in such dramatic conditions, I might never have asked myself the question.”
You say you want the establishment and the National Education, why?
“It’s all well and good to do training for raising awareness about harassment. It’s often done by outside people like gendarmes, doctors, judges, prosecutors. So yes, they are confronted with it, but not completely. People, young people take it so much as a joke. Shortly before the trial, I learned that the father of a friend of Juliette had alerted the Gambier high school, a week before her suicide, saying that he was worried about my daughter. But that came to nothing, the file was closed without further action. I was never warned, neither the school nurse nor anyone. Now we are in a state to ask ourselves the question, is “She would still be here if we had been told? Maybe not, maybe she is. We’ll never know.”
Snapchat, Instagram… it’s going fast, too fast for us, we need to be more interested in our children
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