It is a moving testimony that the viewers of France 2 were able to discover in The Kindergarten House, this Monday, November 8, 2021. The columnist of C to you (France 5) Mohamed Bouhafsi was the guest of Agathe Lecaron. And he returned to the violence he suffered from his dad, during his childhood.
It is a very personal project that Mohamed Bouhafsi came to promote in the program of the second channel. On November 3, his book was published Dreaming under the blows, with the collaboration of Géraldine Maillet, and published by Larousse editions. He says there that until the age of 8 he was a battered child. A subject on which he returned to Agathe Lecaron.
The 29-year-old first clarified that until he was 8, he grew up with his mum who was in an irregular situation and his dad who had the papers. The latter owned a café, but his mother took care of everything. “He didn’t take care of anything and when he took care of things, it was unpleasant and violent things“, he confided.
His first memories with his dad were the beating he gave his mother every day. And he recounted a heartbreaking scene: “Home, with my mother, it was a lot of beatings until the age of eight. The first memory I have with my father is my mother rue Saint-Vincent de Paul in the 10th arrondissement, who runs, who has a swollen face, who is bleeding and who has an open head. Me throwing myself on my father, telling him: ‘Stop daddy, stop daddy’ and me which ends in the plaster with the head open. This has been repeated over and over again.“
Mohamed Bouhafsi was indeed beaten several times a week by his dad, which often led him to the hospital. “There is a doctor who understood, but it had become almost a game (…) It was to say: ‘We must avoid the head of department.’ There is so much turnover in hospitals that sometimes we would see interns and they would say: ‘But what’s going on?’ and my mother would say: ‘He’s a Pierre Richard my son, he’s very clumsy.’“, he continued. At the time, they indeed did everything so that what he was undergoing was not known.
This violence, his half-brothers and sisters also lived it daily. “The violence was psychological“, said the columnist who is in a relationship. It was then necessary to rebuild, a new ordeal.