A bus driver in Hennebont in Brittany asked a mother and her 2-year-old son to get off the bus. The reason ? The little man was screaming too much.
The scene is staggering. It took place on September 2, the start of the school year for kindergarten, primary, middle and high school students. Julie Toulliou and her son Albin, barely 2 years old, quietly take the 417 bus, direction Paul-Langevin college in Hennebont, a small town located in Brittany near Lorient. They go to this place to pick up the eldest of the siblings. But the journey does not go as planned: the little boy begins to be heard. “After 10 minutes, the driver, exasperated by my son’s cries, asked us to get out of the bus”, tells the mother of the family to our colleagues from Telegram. To calm things down, the mother explains to the driver that her child is not doing it on purpose, that he is suffering from severe hyperactivity.
This attention deficit disorder, called ADHD, is an often misunderstood disease. People who have it have, for the most part, difficulty concentrating, they act impulsively and can also have impressive temper tantrums (screaming, aggressiveness, etc.).
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The parents file a complaint, the company minimizes the incident!
Despite these justifications, the driver sticks to his positions. Some passengers react by protesting but nothing helps. “He stopped the bus (…), making me understand that he did not have to endure the cries of my too agitated son”, says Julie Toulliou. A humiliating and intolerable situation, that the parents of little Albin do not want to let pass. The next day, they decided to file a complaint with the Languidic gendarmerie, a neighboring town. They tried to contact the services of the CTRL network, in charge of the bus lines, to no avail. They also plan to report the incident to associations for the defense of people with disabilities. “It is not tolerable to discriminate against a child in this way. He is different, but he has the same rights as others”, denounces the mother of the family.
For the time being, the driver involved has simply had the right to a call to order, on September 8, by his company. The latter tried to justify the act of her employee in a press release: “Ms. Toulliou and her child were not disembarked by the driver: they got out on their own initiative. In no case was her child’s state of health mentioned or discriminated against. Our driver remained quite formal in his explanations. A call to order will be notified to him in the coming days for the disrespectful remarks he could have made. I will apologize to Ms. Toulliou on behalf of the network, because the driver must be able to remain in control of his emotions, whatever the situation. ”, nuance Bruno Percheron, director of the CTRL company.