It’s Christmas in 2015. Julia, Marie and Alicia* are visiting their aunt. The three sisters learn that their father, who abused them throughout their youth, has a new partner and a 4-year-old little girl. It’s a shock.
A year later, they received a message from the girl’s mother on social networks. The latter, who is very young, tells them that she lost custody of her daughter. The little girl now lives alone with her father.
“We said to ourselves, OK, history repeats itself. The mother is no longer there, he is alone with his daughter. At least there were several of us. She is completely alone,” says Marie. This is what made the three sisters decide to do what they had never really managed to do over these long years.
Denounce.
It took quite a while before they managed to enter a police station. The police, the DPJ, the school: all of that was “the system,” their father constantly hammered to them, a system to which under no circumstances should they reveal what was happening at home.
One of my therapies was to trust the police. Because for me, it was the system.
Alicia
“I did desensitization. I first went near the station. I parked in front. And then, I managed to get in,” says Alicia, the youngest of the three sisters.
Julia and Alicia went to the station together on this day in 2017. Marie was not present: she lived outside Quebec. But she assured her sisters that she was also ready to testify. Julia, the eldest, was the one who suffered the worst abuse. Years of common sexual assault. From the age of 6, her father put her to bed every night. She had suffered touching and full sexual relations.
Their mother, of indigenous origin, had left their father when the girls were very young. She was then pregnant with her little brother, the youngest of the siblings. The father used a court order to pick up the child, when he had just been born, on the reserve where their mother lived.
Years later, the girls saw their mother again, who barely spoke French. “She told us that her children were taken away from her. She tried to find us. His brothers tried to find us. All links have been cut. We were taken from our mother,” says Alicia. Finding the father and his children was not easy: they moved regularly and the man made sure that his name never appeared in the telephone directory.
“People from our mother’s family told us that they had a big argument, my mother was tired of her discipline. My father told us she was a typical native alcoholic. But she rather rebelled against my father’s influence…” said Marie.
After their mother left, the violence continued in the house. Julia found herself in their father’s bed. The other three children were regularly beaten.
There was always someone on shift getting beaten up in the house. There was always someone crying in bed. If we cried too hard, he would come back and beat us.
Alicia
Their father beat them with fists on their heads, trying as hard as possible to leave bruises on their little bodies.
Alicia vividly remembers the first time she was beaten. She was 5 years old. “We wanted to play with a boat in the bath. My father was very angry that I had not listened to the instructions. He grabbed me by the arm, he threw me against the wall, he punched me, he took me upstairs, pulling my hair. It always ended up in bed. He punches three or four times with great force to the head, to the hair. I have memories of crying for an hour, two hours. I got beaten every three days. My sisters, it was every two days, and my brother, it was every day. »
The father, who lived on social assistance, recruited his children into small undeclared jobs. “We begged, he made us sell chocolate, he always found us little jobs. We assembled small laboratory bottles. We made hundreds of them. We were in the living room doing assembly line work,” Alicia remembers. The family also lived in the shadow of the Children of God sect, of which the father had been a part since the mid-1970s. “This sect was the basis of our childhood. He drilled that into our heads, says Marie. I still have nightmares about Apocalypse. » The leaders of this religious group were convicted in the United States in the 1980s for incest, incitement to prostitution and pedophilia.
We went door to door with him to beg because when we rang the doorbell, if there were children, it was more profitable for him. He put us in the doors of shopping centers with pamphlets. I was so afraid of seeing teachers or people I knew…
Married
This is all that Julia and Alicia told the police in 2017. This story set the police station on fire. “It was a bomb for the police. They immediately called the DPJ. They were in emergency mode, they had to find the little girl. They pushed hard to get her immediately. We didn’t expect that, says Alicia. We thought they weren’t going to believe us. »
* All the first names that we use in this text are assumed names, since a publication ban prohibits us from revealing the real identity of the siblings, as well as that of the half-sister, who is still minor age.