Faced with the confidence of a child who reveals having been sexually assaulted by an adult, do the French know how to react? To this question asked in a study, the answer is rather worrying.
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In a study, commissioned by Ciivise, the independent commission on incest and sexual violence against children, and carried out among a thousand respondents, two thirds of French people believe they are well informed on the issue of sexual violence against children. children, eight out of ten also say that they would know how to react if a child confided in them. Except that in reality this is far from being the case.
“The French have the impression of knowing that, when we go into detail, there is a lot of confusionexplains Solène Podevin Favre, member of the governing body of Ciivise. We are really in the worst situation: no one has a clear idea of the procedure to follow or how to collect the confidence and what to do with this confidence.”
The people interviewed also have difficulty estimating the extent of the phenomenon. In France, more than five million adults were victims of sexual violence in their childhood, except that 80% of respondents underestimate this figure, regrets Solène Podevin Favre. “Everyone knows there are three children per class but what does that really mean? We still have people at dinners who are surprised to hear a confidence as if it affected three children per class, but all the others and not us”she notes.
It is even more complicated when it comes to considering the number of child criminals because we must realize, explains Ciivise, that for each victim, there is an aggressor. For almost three years, the Ciivise gathered some 30,000 testimonies from victims, revealed the mechanisms of incest, its destructive lifelong effects, its cost for society. Even today, a child suffers sexual violence every three minutes in France.