The accounts of victims of incest during a public meeting in Nantes: “I’ve been fighting all alone in the dark for twenty years” – Le Monde

There is the one who hardly utters a few words and whose voice breaks into a sob. The one who “Does not need a microphone” because she speaks very loudly, swinging her story like a cry. The one who begins by apologizing, because she is not used to speaking like this, in public, to tell what happened so long ago, out of sight. About twenty women and a man testified about their past as a child attacked, raped, Wednesday, October 20, in Nantes, during the first public meeting organized by the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence against Children (Ciivise) officially installed in March.

About 80 people were present in the room of the old tobacco factory, “la Manu”, a large building bringing together several municipal services, chosen to host the meeting.

With sometimes bumped flows, interspersed with question mark silences, the victims told the members of the commission what they had been through. Like Virginie, in her forties, assaulted while she was entrusted to a child welfare establishment (ASE) until she was 8 years old, almost surprised to speak because, “Like the lady before, [elle] had never spoken of it “.

Two sisters came together. The first one gets up: “I have experienced incest for over thirteen years. We filed a complaint because there were several of us in the family (…) My older sister lodged a complaint but was not heard, because we lived in a small town, and our parents knew the gendarmes… ” She bursts into tears. “It’s been over thirty years, and today I’m starting to wake up telling myself we have to move on. But how do you move on when you’ve been through all this? “, she asks, before welcoming the existence of the Ciivise. “It’s important to have someone to call, because since the affair of the person whose name I forgot, we keep talking about it. Someone famous had to arrive so that others could hear the voices of little people like us ”, she concludes.

“Experiential knowledge”

It is indeed in the wake of the explosion caused by the publication of the book La Familia grande (Threshold, 208 pages, 18 euros), by Camille Kouchner, who were appointed, on January 23, the two co-presidents of Ciivise, Edouard Durand, a former children’s judge, and Nathalie Mathieu, general manager of the Docteurs Bru association, a structure specializing in the reception of young girls victims of incest.

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