“That means that pretty much everyone has an incest survivor among their friends and relatives,” Loiseleur, of the advocacy group In the Face of Incest, said. Their stories, horrific as they are, may not be as uncommon as you might think.Īccording to a national online poll released last November by Face of Incest and Ipsos, about 10 percent of the French population – or 6.7 million people – says they have been a victim of incest. “I remember hoping that one day, someone would tell me he wasn’t my real father. Afterwards, she would rush to the bathroom to scrub herself raw, in a futile attempt to clean off the feeling of being dirty. Every time he touched her, she would be overwhelmed with nausea and the urge to vomit. As soon as she started showing signs of development at the age of 11, her father would touch her chest and genitals and erupt in a fit of rage if she tried to refuse. In a candid conversation with VICE World News, Carine freely shared details of her abuse. Sometimes it happened between the two of them, other times it happened in the presence of her cousins who were also among his many victims.īut she suffers from post-traumatic amnesia, and doesn’t know for sure if the molestation stopped there.Ĭarine, 42, who requested anonymity, was abused by her father, who told her that it was normal for dads to explore how their daughters’ bodies were changing during puberty. He would touch her genitals, and ask her to touch his. Tricotelle, the 37-year-old who was abused by her grandfather, thinks the abuse started when she was five, and lasted until her grandfather’s death when she was 13. While Macron refrained from using the word “incest” in his speech, his language was strong, acknowledging “stolen childhoods” and “shattered lives in the sanctuary of a child’s bedroom.”įor survivors, it can take years, sometimes decades, to confront their trauma and talk about their experience. And that’s the first step in allowing people to speak openly about what happens.” It’s the first time in a long time, maybe the first time ever, that I’m hearing this word said out loud in the public like this. “Just the very fact that we’re saying the word ‘incest’ is huge.
“There’s a big shift happening in France right now. We believe you,” he said in a two-minute message.īut as Cathy Milard, director of SOS Inceste, a support group for survivors of sexual violence points out, the fact that incest is being talked about openly – without being watered down by euphemisms – marks a huge step for victims and survivors.
In the weeks since, the social media campaign, which was organised by a collective of feminists Nous Toutes (All of Us) and inspired by the book, has brought one of society’s most taboo subjects out into the open, spurring national debate in France the Senate to revisit consent laws and President Emmanual Macron to weigh in on the conversation with promises of increased support to victims of incest. Often it’s victims who feel ashamed, even though it should be the other way around. “I felt like I no longer had to hide, or feel ashamed of what I went through. “It was a huge relief to send the tweet,” Tricotelle told VICE World News.
Her tweet would be one of tens of thousands of testimonials to take over Twitter in France this month under the hashtag #metooinceste, and build on the momentum of an explosive tell-all book, La Familia Grande, that accused a well-known French intellectual and media personality of committing incest and sexual abuse.
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