Will the Metoo wave extend to the armies? A former French navy soldier denounces the impunity enjoyed by her attacker after having nevertheless admitted to repeated sexual assaults. More and more testimonies highlight the poor handling of sexual violence within the army.
Manon Dubois no longer wants to hide to tell her story. In October 2019, she was only 18 years old when she embarked on her first mission as a sailor, as a cook aboard the anchor lift barge the Telenn Mor, a flat-bottomed boat nicknamed “the garbage collector of the seas”, loaded to raise the anchors or change the pontoons. In the kitchen, she suffered a first series of sexual assaults from a sailor electrician : “At first, he left the door open… And then, later, he started closing it. It was a simple hand on the buttocks, touching. Or he would try to kiss me by force or push me against the kitchen counter and stick to me, rubbing his penis against mine. It was at least once or twice a week, for a year and a half. It’s as if I was there, without being there. I couldn’t think, act, move. I knew it wasn’t normal, but there was a part of me that said ‘Manon, it’s not that serious’“.
Manon Dubois speaks about it to her superiors, minimizing the facts. “The commander did not have enough elements for a sanction“, assures the Maritime Prefecture. The electrician is simply called to order and the young girl continues to be attacked, in silence. She no longer dares to say anything. The attacker leaves the boat before her, at the end of his contract, but, two years later, in September 2021, by unfortunate coincidence, Manon found him on the frigate Normandie.
“I see his last name in front of my door and I say to myself this is not possible… And then, I meet him in a corridor. And there, he does it again. I find myself locked with him in a room and the worst thing that has ever happened happens.”
A new sexual assault that Manon cannot tell. “And two days later I collapse, I can no longer speak“, she confides.
“Well yes, but he was in love”
The young woman alerts her chain of command, which triggers an investigation. Before the military hierarchy, his attacker admitted the facts. About sixty in total. He received 10 days of layoff. “You can hear me, you can hear him and the coxswain of the boat says to me ‘well yes, but he was in love'”, remembers Manon with amazement. She will not be disembarked because the mission must be completed at sea. She is simply asked to change rooms, but every evening for another 10 days, she serves food to her attacker.
The Maritime Prefecture concedes this today: “Global, military or judicial sanctions are not at the level of the damage suffered“. But the communications officer of the Atlantic maritime district command, Alban Simon, insists: “The institution is attentive to these cases, and does not protect the executioners“.
:quality(50)/2024/03/26/20240325-193258-6602724194574463955119.jpg)
The maritime gendarmes are notified and the courts are seized. Once on land, Manon filed a complaint, on the Brest base, on October 22, 2021, but she had to leave the navy reluctantly, in a state of post-traumatic stress, according to the expertise of a psychologist. She is no longer able to work. To investigators, his attacker confirmed “that she probably did not consent and that he did it without necessarily asking her permission“. He adds “that she had repeatedly told him no about going out with him“, but he escapes the criminal court, because the Rennes public prosecutor’s office then validates a criminal composition procedure, on the proposal of the military hierarchy, an alternative to prosecutions demanded by the military hierarchy and which avoids the soldier being included in bulletin number 2 of the criminal record, which leads to exclusion from the army. The decision falls on December 8, 2023: the court orders him to pay 600 euros in damages and to follow a course to combat sexism and violence against women to his costs.
Preferential treatment
An incomprehensible sanction for Manon’s lawyer, Julien Richou, at Humanis Avocats: “The judicial institution itself, in concert with the National Navy, will offer this preferential treatment to this sailor so that he remains in the navy. With this procedure, there is no public hearing, the closed session of the national navy continues within the judicial institution, all to protect the image of the navy, because the aggressor rather has a mediocre record. From the moment the aggressor comes from the military institution, he receives preferential treatment and you, as the victim, receive less favorable treatment.he denounces.
For his part, Rennes prosecutor Philippe Astruc explains to Franceinfo that “The Rennes public prosecutor’s office uses the entire range of legally possible criminal responses, taking into account the elements of the procedure, the personality of the accused, the harm suffered by the victim and the risk of recurrence. The particularity in military matters, in addition to the obligatory notice, is that a disciplinary response may or may not have already been provided and which the prosecution takes into account in its response.“.
“My mailbox has become the #MeToo of the armies”
However, Manon’s case is far from isolated, denounces Laetitia Saint-Paul, soldier in the Army reserve and Renaissance deputy for Maine-et-Loire. The elected member of the National Assembly wishes to encourage the victims of these alleged attacks within the armed forces to speak out. However, an anti-harassment plan already exists, recalls the elected representative of Saumur-Sud. Since 2014, the army has had a service to combat sexual violence, the Themis cell. No less than 220 reports were recorded in 2023, a third of which for rape, but out of 300,000 people in the army. “These figures are clownish“, protests the MP.
After a call for testimonials, she received around twenty messages in a few days: “My inbox has become the #MeToo of the armies, I have received many testimonies, poignant testimonies, asking me, ‘please don’t abandon me’. Victims who have truly suffered the same mechanism as Manon, the shame, the fear of suffering the double or triple punishment, of having been attacked, of seeing their attacker live with virtual impunity, of undergoing a mutation that they do not are not desired because, often, the problem is dismissed and not treated. It’s moving, trying… My colleague told me ‘What we’re doing is a public health mission’“. Laetitia Saint-Paul is today asking that the Minister of the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, set up an internal investigation and that the “zero impunity” decreed by the politician now infuses on the ground.
Sheltered on her native island, Manon Dubois tries to rebuild herself far from the French Navy: “Already, I wasn’t expecting anything, but with this court decision, I was right to expect nothing. Today, after five years, I want to turn the page and move forward“, she concludes.