“With Ciivise, we responded to a social fact. It created a lot of hope and now, we must support the measures,” insists a victim who became a child rights activist, who accuses society of still not protect them.
“We must protect the victims, we must go and find these children,” calls Friday November 17 on franceinfo Arnaud Gallais, child rights activist, member of the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Against Children (Ciivise). Three years after its creation, this commission released a report on Friday in which it recommended 82 measures, including the imprescriptibility of sexual violence against minors, that is to say the fact of being able to prosecute, regardless of the time after the fact, a person for acts of sexual violence against minors. For Arnaud Gallais, himself a victim of incest in his childhood, which he recounts in I was a child (Flammarion), if this measure is transcribed into law, “never again will attackers benefit from a form of impunity that we know today.”
franceinfo: Can these recommendations address trauma?
Arnaud Gallais: Of course, since these recommendations respond to all the suffering that the victims are experiencing and to what the President of the Republic himself had appointed in 2021. Emmanuel Macron, following the MeTooInceste movement, had said something strong: “You do not you’ll never be alone again.” I think that today, it is this necessary social support, essential for the victims, that the Civil Society has come to express. We still had nearly 30,000 testimonies in two years, 27,000 to be exact, which shows that it is a social fact in a certain way, and that was essential.
Among the keys to this report, there is this proposal to make sexual violence against minors imprescriptible. This means that until the end of his life, a person will be able to say ‘When I was a child, I was a victim of such people’. Is it possible ?
Of course it’s possible. In Europe, you have England, the Netherlands, Belgium, which have done it. What must be understood is that we must take into consideration the mechanism of traumatic amnesia experienced by 40% of victims, but also all the psycho-traumatic consequences, the influence that there is on the incest patterns. In a way, never again will attackers benefit from a form of impunity that we know today.
“73% of complaints for rape of minors are dismissed, which means that we are in a regime of total impunity.”
Arnaud Gallais, child rights activistat franceinfo
You only have less than 1% that end up in assizes, which are considered crimes. Gisèle Halimi said “rape is a crime”. In my opinion, we can legitimately ask ourselves, if we look at these figures, whether rape is really a crime. Now we must act as the president asked.
“We listen to you, we believe you. You will never be alone again”, this is actually what Emmanuel Macron said in 2021 during the launch of his commission. There are now spots on television to encourage children to talk, and you say that this does not solve the problem, that we do not protect children sufficiently?
The 27,000 testimonies are eloquent. At the Civic level, only 8% of people say they have benefited from positive social support, the famous “I believe you, I protect you”. 92% of the others, it’s negative social support. This means that in the vast majority of cases the children were told: “I believe you, but I do not protect you”, at the risk, as in the incest that I recount in my book, of causing the family to explode. . For girls, we have many testimonies of words heard such as “She was perhaps consenting”, etc. The problem, in reality, is the liberation of listening and the actions behind it.
“Children actually talk, but we don’t hear them, we don’t listen to them, and above all, we don’t protect them.”
Arnaud Gallaisat franceinfo
160,000 child victims each year, according to Ciivise. Among these children, there was you. You were eight years old. In your book, you actually talk about the difficulty of putting words into words and then the impact on your family. And yet, it is fundamental, even at the risk of breaking a taboo and sometimes breaking up families.
Of course, I say that and I also say that I had enuresis, I wet the bed until I was twelve. The only thing the family doctor suggested to me was the “pee stop” method, although today we know well that it is one of the symptoms of child victims of abuse and that is is a cry of alarm. This is also why victims have been exposing themselves for many years, this is not new, we have in the Ciivise a person like Eva Thomas (former teacher, the first French woman to have openly denounced the incest that she suffered on television in 1986). Today it is about taking action and political power must be up to the challenge. With Ciivise, we responded to a social fact. It created a lot of hope and now we have to support the measures. We have been sacrificed by society because society decided not to protect us. Today, we must protect the victims, we must seek out these children and we have a doctrine that would effectively allow us to do so. What is necessary now must be done.
If you are a child in danger, if you are a person who witnesses or suspects sexual violence against a child or if you wish to seek advice, there is a national telephone number for children in danger: 119, open 24/7. The call is free and the number is not visible on telephone bills. It is also possible to send a written message to 119 via the form to fill out online or to get in touch via an online chat: allo119.gouv.fr. For deaf and hard of hearing people, a specific system is available on the website allo119.gouv.fr