Numerous people share their experiences of family attacks under the hashtag. Politicians are under pressure.
Duhamel and the others, you will never be at peace – #MeTooInceste Photo: Francois Mori / ap
A hopefully salutary debate: after the lawyer Camille Kouchner’s revelations about alleged rape, a discussion about sexual violence in families has broken out in France. Under the hashtag #MeTooInceste, the feminist collective “Nous Toutes” has launched a long-planned campaign on Twitter. The response is just as huge in the number of contributions as it is shocking in the content. Almost 80,000 tweets were listed in just three days.
This was preceded by the publication of Camille Kouchner’s book “La Familia grande”. In it, she accuses her stepfather of sexual assaults on her then 13 or 14-year-old twin brother – it also made waves because this stepfather is the political scientist Olivier Duhamel, who is very well known in France.
The short texts of today’s adults often begin similarly: “I was 6, then 7, 8 and finally 9 years old when my brother raped me. To this day, I try to reconcile myself with the child that I was then and that I thought I had often given up. “ This is what Laurent Boyet writes on Twitter, who also publishes his photo. He himself published a book on the subject three years ago, but without achieving a comparable effect. The environmental politician Loubna Meliane now relentlessly reveals: “I was 9 and I will never forget the feeling of shame, guilt and vulnerability. His name is Khalid Meliane. He was my father, he raped me until I was 17 years old. “
The writer Christine Angot – herself a victim of incest – also wanted to clear up a misunderstanding on Radio France-Inter: If it was often said that the victims “didn’t want to talk”, that was wrong because they “couldn’t” because their mouths seemed to be closed . In the Duhamel case, it was only today, after more than thirty years, that the victim filed a criminal complaint – which, as in many cases, should not lead to a trial because of the statute of limitations.
It cannot be postponed
As with the #MeToo campaign after the Weinstein scandal, the network’s public allows it to break the silence on incest cases of pediatric crime and to denounce the often complicit role of the perpetrators’ family environment. The anthropologist Dorothée Dussy recalls in the newspaper Liberation because for decades 5 to 10 percent of children in Europe have been victims of sexual violence by dominant men in their families.
Prime Minister Jean Castex said in an understatement on France-5 television: “It seems that there is a real problem.” But he would like to avoid legislation “under the impression of emotion”. The State Secretary for Childhood, Adrien Taquet, on the other hand, called on the members of the National Assembly to ensure that everything is not put into perspective or postponed again with “the blanket of denial”. It so happened that on Thursday the Senate passed a bill stating that adults cannot rely on “consent” in sexual intercourse with minors under the age of 13, but instead are guilty of a sexual crime.
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