a couple indicted and imprisoned for acts of torture on their 4-year-old child

A 21-year-old mother and her 24-year-old partner were indicted and remanded in custody for acts of torture and barbarism on their four and a half year old child, announced the Bourges (Cher) prosecutor’s office on Saturday January 22. The boy’s mother and stepfather admitted to having “locked up the child for sometimes several days by depriving him of water and food, then having tied him by the neck to his bed using a chain and a padlock”, said the public prosecutor Joël Garrigue in a press release.

The boy was also submissive “to repeated acts of violence and physical punishment since September 2021”, according to the same source. The child was the victim of bullying, blows and slaps before being locked in his room, without water and without food or the possibility of going to the toilet. He was also schooled in dotted line.

The child was hospitalized on Monday January 17, after feeling unwell at the primary school in which he is educated. The hospital medical examiner then discovered “traumatic injuries”, from “bruises on limbs and back”, as well as a “scalp sore”. In “a state of very great thinness”, he was entrusted to the services of the Childhood Social Assistance, just like his one-year-old sister, “who seems not to have been subjected to violence”. The investigation was entrusted to the gendarmerie of Saint-Armand-Montrond, 40 kilometers south of Bourges, said the prosecution, which opened a judicial investigation for “deprivation of care or food”, “violence on a minor ” and “torture or act of barbarism on a minor”. The mother and her companion face a 30-year prison sentence.