It is at the source of a terrible tragedy that the Senlis criminal court is preparing to go back up on Monday January 31 and Tuesday February 1. That of Shaïna, 15, stabbed and burned alive in a city of Creil, in the Oise, on October 25, 2019. Mobile of the 17-year-old boyfriend, suspected of having killed her: Shaïna was pregnant, and this pregnancy would have cast upon him infamy. The investigation will reveal after her death that, two years before the night of the tragedy, Shaïna had been the victim of a gang rape by other boys in the neighborhood, who will therefore be tried in a few days.
The tragedy had gone almost unnoticed at the time. A white march in the city and barely a few articles in the local press. Nothing to do with the repercussion given 20 years ago to the death in conditions sadly close to the young Sohane, burned alive in a garbage room in Vitry-sur-Seine. This tragic death had led to the birth of the association “Ni putes, ni submitted”.
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It all starts when Shaïna is 13 years old: she joins in a disused building, a former clinic, her boyfriend who blackmails her with nude photos he has. She will explain that she suffered sexual violence from her, but also from other boys. They would have been in fact four or five friends, gathered for this moment of great humiliation, where they demand that she undress to finish, she will tell, by introducing a stick of lip balm into her vagina.
The scene is filmed, and images posted on Snapchat the same day, quickly build the young girl’s reputation as a “prostitute” who then circulates in the neighborhood. 18 months later, the ex-boyfriend, left free by the judge during the investigation, meets Shaïna again in the surroundings and beats her with her friends. His fault ? Have had the audacity to file a complaint.
Finally, in October 2019, Shaïna, a few days pregnant, was found dead in an abandoned shed, near allotment gardens. She was stabbed three times in the stomach, doused with a bottle of gasoline and then burned alive. A lighter will be found in the rubble.
Her new boyfriend is inquired, charged and imprisoned. She thought she could console herself in his arms. He would have it actually chosen precisely for her reputation as a girl of little virtue, because he wanted to have sex with her. The announcement of this pregnancy would then have been an infamy for him and for his family: he would therefore have preferred to simply delete Shaïna who had expressed the wish to keep this child.
This violence took place over two years, in the restricted perimeter of the Rouher plateau, a small city with bars of dilapidated buildings and modest pavilions, located above the city center of Creil. It is in one of these pavilions that Yasin, 24, Shaïna’s big brother, welcomes franceinfo. He tries in vain to understand the hell experienced by his sister, to whom he was very close in a close-knit family, and why, even today, some find excuses for this assassination.
“I lost a part of me. Living today without my sister is a nightmare. My sister was a very smiling young girl. She was the one who brought joy to our house. She was a sun.”
Yasin, Shaina’s older brotherat franceinfo
“Shaïna always wanted to live her life freely, it didn’t please the areahe explains. We gave her the reputation of an easy girl, especially via social networks. He cannot explain the mentality of his attackers: “I could not tell you how these people think, whether it is in the name of a religion or a certain education. But it is worthy of a film from the Middle Ages. Why so much relentlessness on Shaïna who never hurt?”
Shaïna’s family is of Mauritian origin and of Muslim faith. It is also the religion of the families of those accused of attacking her. “We practice a modern Islam. We are Muslims open to others and to French culture. For us, Islam has never prevented people from living as they wish if it is with respect for others and the tolerance”, says Shakill, the dad. So eIs this drama a question of religion, of sexuality experienced as a shameful taboo or a question of conservative popular culture? Difficult to answer. Shaïna’s mother, Parveen, 42, denounces this law of silence imposed on women in her neighborhood as in others.
“If you are a woman, you stay in your place, that’s how it is. Shaïna was strong, courageous, she dared to speak and they didn’t like that. Even grown-ups considered that my daughter was not was not frequentable, without even knowing right from wrong. She was still only a child!”
Parveen, Shaina’s motherat franceinfo
“It’s not because she dressed, put on a little makeup, made herself beautiful for herself, that we could stop her”, she adds. But Shaina’s drama is not an isolated case: “Several girls from the neighborhood came to see me to tell me that they too had been assaulted, but that they were afraid to file a complaint, they received threats. They are silent so as not to end up like Shaïna. Can you imagine? I don’t understand, we are in France, not in Afghanistan. Why does it happen here?”
Two and a half years after Shaina’s death, she parents are frozen. They still live in the same little house, close to the cemetery where Shaina rests. Upstairs, the teenager’s bedroom is intact, with her little girl dolls, her Disney princess stickers and stuffed animals. A mhouse located a few hundred meters from the buildings where the families of those who will have to answer to justice live. AT approaching the first trial behind closed doors, that of the gang rape of the teenager, her parents Shakill and Parveen want us to talk about their daughter. That she died in these conditions and in the most total indifference amazes them.
Consumed by grief and anger, the father, Shakill, struggles to express himself at length. He who does “trust in justice“Still waiting for a conviction “quite severe” for his daughter’s attackers. When he speaks, it is often his wife, Parveen, who takes over to finish his sentences and bring the word to the whole family.
“Revenge will get us nowhere, it will not make things better. We trust in justice, we expect a lot from it, because if the judgment is severe, it will prevent the aggressors [de recommencer]. This is what we expect from justice, that now the aggressors are afraid [avant d’agresser].”
Parveen, Shaina’s motherat franceinfo
Not a comment from the lawyer of the one accused of having raped Shaïna, Archibald Celeyron, who only recalls that his client disputes the facts with which he is accused. He and his friends will be at the helm of the Senlis criminal court on January 31 and February 2, 2022. No interview either with Adel Farès, the lawyer for the person being prosecuted for the assassination of the teenager. We only know that his client also denies it. In pre-trial detention, he will not be tried for several months, probably before the assize court for minors in the Oise. Shaïna’s family lawyer, master Negar Haeri, recovered the two files.
“She was very brave, at 13, to file a complaint. It is abnormal for a victim of sexual assault to be considered an easy girl, that is to say that there is a reversal of values. “
Master Negar Haeri, lawyer for Shaïna’s familyat franceinfo
For her, the two cases are linked and must question our society. “A drama like this is one of the most far-reaching consequences of patriarchy which establishes inequality between the two sexes, then an omnipotence of man. It is the idea that a boy is not the equal of a woman and has the possibility of considering her as an object with all the consequences that entails, ie to reduce her by insults or to reduce her by blows or to reduce her by fire. And it can be played at any age.” Shaïna was in a pre-established relationship with this boy, his death is therefore to be counted among marital feminicides.
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With Alisha, thrown into the Seine at the age of 14, in Argenteuil in March 2021, Shaïna is among the youngest victims of feminicides in France in recent years, according to the census of the collective “Feminicides by companions or ex”.
Even today, in the city of Rouher in Creil, almost no one agrees to talk to our microphone about what happened to Shaïn / A. And there are always – even if it seems crazy – the “pro-Shaïna” and those who, on the contrary, line up behind the one who is accused of having killed her. The latter, imprisoned since the events, would have explained to a fellow prisoner, who himself confided in the magistrates, that he “prefer to take life anyway than be the father of a bastard”.