As always when it comes to sexual violence against children, terror competes with amazement when reading the main lessons of a study on young people entrusted to the Childhood Social Assistance (ASE) of Seine-Saint-Denis, made public on Thursday March 9, at the Bobigny labor exchange, during the 21e Meetings of the observatory of violence against women in the department.
The study was conducted on 100 minor victims of sexual violence placed in child protection. “These are 100 files that particularly marked the ASE inspectors who selected them”, explains Alix Vallot, the research officer at the observatory who carried out this work, which lasted a year. The panel is made up of 84 girls and 16 boys, with an average age of 14 years and 7 months.
Of these 100 children, 72 were victims of incest; in 94 cases, violence are coming of a person around them, men in the vast majority of cases. The first lesson that reminds us, once again, of a reality established by all the scientific literature on sexual violence against minors: it is within the family that this violence is perpetrated.
Multiple attackers
Unlike, very often, extra-familial sexual violence, the latter are characterized by their repetition and their duration. The study specifies that for 75 out of 100 children, it is rape. “Very often, the placement, when it occurs for other facts, allows the child to reveal the sexual violence he suffered”, explains Alix Vallot. While 67 children in the sample had been victims before their placement, 57 were also victims during it, even though they had been entrusted – sometimes for other reasons – with a view to their protection.
Unlike, very often, extra-familial sexual violence, intra-family violence, which is the majority, is characterized by its repetition and its duration.
In detail, it is mainly (for 29 children out of 57) in their place of placement (which may be the parental home in situations of placement at home) that the violence was suffered. When the violence took place in homes, 24 children were victims of other foster children, and 6 by professionals or someone close to them. Among the 57, 15 children were assaulted or raped during visitation and accommodation rights decided by the judge, the study said.
Finally, as other studies have already shown before this one, it appears that child victims are often victimized by several aggressors; in this case, the 100 children whose path was dissected were attacked or raped by more than two attackers. Almost all of them are also victims of other types of violence (psychological for 90% of them, physical for 79%, co-victims of domestic violence for 58%).
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