There will be a before and an after the Duhamel affair. In her book La Familia grande, which appears on Thursday, the lawyer Camille Kouchner accuses his stepfather , the political scientist Olivier Duhamel, of having sexually assaulted his twin brother when he had 14 years. The Paris prosecutor announced on Tuesday the opening of an investigation for “rape and sexual assault by person in authority”. A revelation that sounds like an explosion, analyzes Isabelle Aubry *, president and founder of the association Face à inceste: “The fact that this affair affects a public figure gives it a particular resonance. Usually, incest cases are treated as miscellaneous facts, there it becomes a fact of society. ”
This case is also symptomatic of a progressive liberation from word on the subject. “This shift was initiated with the testimony in 666 of a rehabilitation worker, Eva Thomas , who told in a book and in the program The files of the screen the rapes she had suffered by her father . His revelations made a lot of noise at the time, ”recalls historian Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, who specializes in the history of rape and child crime. In the years 1986, other books are published by victims of incest, without making as much noise, but contributing to the collective awareness of the extent of the phenomenon. Then in 1990, it’s the turn of ‘actress Catherine Allégret to tell, in A world upside down, the touching she suffered as a child and the attempted rape, adult, from his stepfather, Yves Montand. “But Catherine Allégret had been criticized for having accused a dead man. The company was not ready to hear it, especially since Yves Montand was a very popular media figure, ”emphasizes Isabelle Aubry.
In 2004, Christine Angot also reveals the rapes committed by his father, in Un amour impossible. But it is with the movement # MeToo, in 2017, that the subject comes up more strongly in the public debate. “The voice of women victims of sexual assault has been freed and this movement has gradually expanded. The sexual abuse experienced by children was discussed, with the hashtag # Iwas , which allowed in 2020 for people who were victims of sexual violence in their childhood to testify on Twitter. We are in a continuum ”, observes psychiatrist Muriel Salmona, also president of the association of traumatic memory and victimology . The Matzneff affair, highlighted by the book Le consent, by Vanessa Springora, also underlined the omerta that reigned in France on pedocriminality in the artistic world. And not only. Testimonies with an immediate snowball effect, according to Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu: “The liberated word of a victim frees others. They no longer feel guilty, can come out of the domination exercised by their aggressor ”, she believes.
Even if the veil is gradually lifting, too many victims still suffer from the taboo around this crime. However, according to an Ipsos study by the association Face à inceste revealed in November, one in ten French people would have been a victim of incest. Which makes it a massive phenomenon. When a child experiences such a tragedy, he sometimes finds himself in a parallel reality, describes Muriel Salmona: “He is emotionally anesthetized. This traumatic anesthesia is his only way to survive ”. He is also under pressure from his attacker: “It is the Gordian knot of incest. The abuser tells the victim not to talk about it and that everyone does it. And the victim feels that they have more to lose than to gain by speaking out. That his revelations would explode the family unit, a cell that is woven with multiple affects ”, underlines Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu.
“The victim is often rejected in favor of the aggressor”
D ‘others still try to communicate with their relatives about what happened to them: “The children speak in their own words about what they have suffered. Or their behavior suddenly changes: they complain of pain, wet the bed, suffer from sleep disorders. But in 8 cases on , when a child speaks, he is told to shut up and to continue behaving as if nothing had happened with his attacker, ”informs Isabelle Aubry. And mothers, when they are aware, sometimes prefer to wall in a protective denial: “Either to preserve their couple, because if they talk to their spouse, they will no longer be able to come to terms with him. Or because the reality is too unbearable “, emphasizes Isabelle Aubry.
Very often, the precise denunciation of the facts arrives late, when the victim becomes an adult:” It intervenes about sixteen years after the rape, when the victim is no longer under the influence of her rapist. It is often at the time of a marriage, the birth of a child or when his child reaches the age that the victim was at the time of the facts, that the need to speak is felt ”, notes Isabelle Aubry . Revelations that cause family upheaval: “The victim is often rejected in favor of the aggressor, who has more power in the family,” observes Isabelle Aubry.
So that cases of incest are no longer passed over in silence, they should first be better detected upstream by professionals. “Only 2% of reports come from doctors,” recognizes the cabinet of Adrien Taquet, Secretary of State for Child Protection. “They are afraid of reprisals, of losing part of their clientele,” explains Isabelle Aubry. “Doctors are not trained and do not know how to detect risky behavior or symptoms that could lead to believe that a child is the victim of sexual violence,” adds Muriel Salmona. The independent commission on incest, chaired by Elisabeth Guigou, relies on the development of reference pediatric teams, responsible for supporting doctors on this subject.
The entourage of the victim should also be able to more easily report incest. “If a child claims to have suffered sexual violence or if one witnesses a prohibited act, it is necessary to report to the police by calling 14. If, on the other hand, you are not at all sure about incest, but you have doubts, you should call 89. A platform
Ministry of the Interior also allows you to chat with a police officer to report sexual violence, ”recalls Muriel Salmona. The independent commission on incest should also “set up a platform to collect the words of victims during the first trimester 2020 ”, explains the entourage of Elisabeth Guigou. One thing is certain: the media hype around the Duhamel affair risks loosing tongues.Isabelle Aubry is the author of Incest: 23 essential questions, Dunod, 2015.
Elisabeth Guigou’s reaction
Elisabeth Guigou, president of the brand new commission on incest, is mentioned among relatives of Olivier Duhamel, accused of incest by his stepdaughter, Camille Kouchner. Asked by 20 Minutes, her entourage declares that she “discovered the facts through the press” and that she had “no longer of contacts with the Duhamel family ”.