PARIS – Hundreds of testimonies have surfaced.
“I was 8, I was abused by my uncle,” reads one post on Twitter. “My father, aged 7 to 14,” said another tweet. “It had to be a holiday, which quickly turned into a nightmare,” someone else posted.
A scandal involving a leading French intellectual accused of sexually abusing his teenage stepson has sparked a flurry of testimonies on social media of people in France saying they were also victims of incest.
Just as the #Metoo movement gained momentum on social networks three years ago, France’s current computer over incest is driven by a hashtag, #Metooinceste, under which about 20,000 tweets were posted on Monday afternoon. Hundreds of posts were slashing accounts of people saying they had been sexually abused as adult children by adult family members.
Patrick Loiseleur, vice president of Facing Incest, a French organization that strives for better recognition of the scope of the case, says the victim’s voices. French law defines incest as a sexual relationship between two people who are related. with each other to an extent where marriage is forbidden, also between siblings or between stepparents and stepchildren. But French law criminalizes incest only in cases of sexual abuse, such as rape or a sexual relationship between an adult and a minor.
The avalanche of testimonies on Twitter follows the scandal surrounding Olivier Duhamel, a leading political scientist and TV commentator, who is accused by his stepdaughter, Camille Kouchner, of abusing her twin brother when he was 14 years old. abuse would be considered a disgrace under French law, although the boy is the stepson of Mr. Duhamel was.
In a book, 11 days ago, “La Familia Grande”, she tells me. Kouchner how mr. Duhamel abused her brother at night before going to bed for a period of about two to three years. She writes that her brother, who told her about the abuse, asked her to keep ‘this secret’.
“Anger did not come immediately,” she wrote. Kouchner. “Misunderstandings lasted a long time, followed by silence, even longer.”
A study released by Facing Incest and polling station Ipsos in November found that one in 10 French people say they were the victim of incest, a proportion that has increased over time as more people feel encouraged to to come to the fore. According to the polling station firm, the share was 3 percent in 2009 and 6 percent in 2015.
Brigitte Macron, the French first lady, told TF1, a French TV station, on Sunday: “It is absolutely essential that these actions are known and that these actions are not silenced.”
Mr Loiseleur said: “Incest is like the elephant in the room that no one wants to see,” adding: “This is the most common form of sexual violence and the least talked about.”
Similar to the scandal surrounding the pedophile writer Gabriel Matzneff, the allegations against Mr. Duhamel caused a great stir in the French settlement. Mr Duhamel was a major figure as head of the governing body overseeing the prestigious Sciences Po University in Paris and president of ‘Le Siècle’, a social club in the capital. Over the past two weeks, suspicion has arisen about who may have known about the accusations and remained silent.
Frédéric Mion, the director of Sciences Po, who according to the newspaper Le Monde has known about the allegations since 2018, is under pressure from his students to retire. Élisabeth Guigou, a former Minister of Justice and good friend of Mr. Duhamel, resigned last week as head of a committee on sexual violence against children, but said she was not aware of the alleged abuse.
Mr. Loiseleur said incest should be identified “as an issue of public health requiring large resources.” His organization has long appealed to the authorities to turn incest into a specific crime, without any restriction.
France recently extended the statute of limitations for rape of minors to 30 years from 20 years, and two bills that would create an age of consent for sexual relations with a minor will soon be submitted to parliament.
French law prohibits sex between adults and minors under the age of 15, but it is not automatically considered rape. Further circumstances, such as the use of coercion, threats or violence, are necessary to characterize sexual relations as rape.
Alexandra Louis, a French lawmaker, said she was working on a bill that would effectively criminalize incest and strengthen the criminalization of sexual relations between an adult and a minor under the age of 15.
In many cases at the moment, she added: “Incest has no real consequences in terms of criminal justice.”