The Injustices podcast, produced by Louie Media, is releasing a new season devoted to the mechanisms of intra-family child crime: how are they perpetuated? Why isn't anyone talking about it? How does this affect victims for long? A fair and moving speech.
Incest figures come up regularly in the public debate. It is estimated that on average 2 to 3 children per class are victims of incest. Broadening the spectrum further, it is estimated that between 7% and 10% of the French population have experienced domestic rape in childhood.
However, incest remains a subject little covered, these figures are quickly forgotten, the company refuses to look at them.
But that's what Charlotte Pudlowski chose to do with Louie Media, her podcast production studio. She explains to us the importance of continuing to deal with this subject: " We are conditioned to this silence: the children are doing badly in the classes and people say nothing, but we don't ask either, we aren't taught to go and help them ”
She treats it in a new way, questioning the origin of this silence, so she explains to us "that people listen to what the victims have to say, and that this sets an example for society ”.
Moving testimonies
The podcast comes from Charlotte's family history. In a loving family, united and leaving room for everyone's voice, she discovers a void, an unsaid: what happened to her mother when she was a child. This void that no one has talked about for 26 years, and that one day arises under Charlotte's questions to her mother. "I quickly realized that we had escaped the worst" says the young woman, talking about her family.
She then asks herself: “What is she carrying, the talk about incest, that everyone wants to choke it, ignore it? What's so subversive about her? (…) It is the silence that surrounds incest that prevents us from seeing its scale and its violence. My mother's looks like all the others. The one learned in childhood conditions all the others. "
Charlotte interviews many victims of the same crime. And always comes the same dead end: how to talk about it, what to say? Julie, interviewed in Episode 1, sums up this trap: " From the first second you can talk but you don't. ”
The young woman tells Charlotte's microphone about what she went through, which she only confided in her teenage years, when she discovers that her mother and her older sister have also been the prey of this abusive patriarch. The violence is twofold: having to tell what happened, and having the feeling of having a secret torn from her that she wanted to take to her grave. The greatest difficulty is to succeed in saying everything, and the functioning of justice does not work in favor of the victims.
The importance of time is also emphasized by Daniela, who also testifies in the first episode. This young woman has chosen today to speak out through the stand-up on the violence suffered. She tells about the time it takes to realize that what is happening to her is not normal. To break out of the silence, you have to understand that there is something to say.
The weight of silence
Each personal testimony is filled with emotion, while maintaining modesty and restraint. The voices convey the experience of each person, which bears witness to their history.
What is common to all of these stories is the fabric of silence that operates on incest. Charlotte's mother confides in her in the first episode: "It was something impossible to tell anyway, I couldn't talk about it."
She tells the weight of this story in the family unit, where the victim cannot speak about it, cannot give this image of the aggressor, where the stories are then suffocated by time.
Charlotte Pudlowski explains in her podcast:
“This is how I started working on incest. To understand why this silence. Why even in a family which seemed to me favorable to let emerge all the stories, and in spite of our very fused relationship with my mother and me, the silence on this subject always won. "
A complete analysis of the problem
The “Or maybe a Night” season is an opportunity to get insights from experts on child crime and incest. We discover the violence and the peculiarities of this trauma.
Children who are victims of incest develop with characteristics stemming from what they have been through. This is what alerts Muriel Salmona, French psychiatrist, founder and president of the association Mémoire traumatique et victimologie, an information and training organization for workers taking care of victims of violence, in particular sexual violence.
Thanks to its lighting, we understand the successive mechanisms facing victims of incest.
The first is forgetting.
Suddenly, the brain breaks off in order to survive, by a mechanism due to the body's physiological reaction to stress. The acts suffered can then be buried for years. The victims do not remember well, see their memories as blurry, feel external to what is happening. Once an adult, it induces memory problems, confusion in dates and facts. These confusions make it difficult to free speech, for fear of appearing to be lying.
What is unique about incest is that dissociation can last forever. Indeed explains Muriel Salmona, the victim remaining in contact with the aggressor system all his life will be subjected to this system which makes the memory “trip”. Difficult then to speak under these conditions.
Muriel Salmona also reveals the phenomenon of perpetrator identification, where trauma victims fear acting like their tormentors.
The season also dissects the biggest obstacle to the words of victims: the paradoxical feeling of shame, the imposition of a silence built around them by all sections of society. The system is unconsciously structured in families in such a way that the right to speak is denied. When victims speak, no one wants to hear them.
"Incest is a core of patriarchy" notes Charlotte Pudlowski. “It is almost always men, patriarchs who take over children's bodies; it's not even a matter of desire, but more often than not a matter of power and domination. "
The judicial system replies on a large scale this imposition of silence, just like the silence of adult teachers or doctors not trained to accept this word who suspect such crimes.
“Or maybe a Night” is finally a new feminist analysis, a recent question in the debate. "Incest is the last frontier in feminist issues. They are getting closer and closer to the intimate, unprofessional setting, and to the case of younger and younger women." notes Charlotte Pudlowski.
Discover this exciting and moving season on your favorite podcast platforms or here on Louie's website: https://louiemedia.com/injustices-2/ou-peut-etre-une-nuit
If you or a member of your family is a victim of incest, many associations exist:
– The AIVI, international association of victims of incest, which offers information resources and can put you in contact with professionals.
– The Women's House, for which aufeminin collected donations during the year, which made it possible to open a new unit for women victims of incest in Saint-Denis.
– theAREVI. Association of action / research and exchange between victims of incest, mutual aid association which intends to promote exchanges between victims, in particular through support groups.