“I was raped by my coach when I was 15. » At the end of January 2020, Sarah Abitbol returns, in the book Such a long silence (Plon), on the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager. The former French figure skater also tells how the one she accuses, Gilles Beyer, was able to continue to take care of young athletes despite the suspicions that weighed on him and an investigation carried out at the turn of the 2000s. did not file a complaint, the facts are time-barred. The issue is elsewhere: “A lot of people kept silent. To break it is to break years of small arrangements, it is to unbalance an entire ecosystem. »
The #metoo surge, which began two and a half years earlier in the United States, has freed speech on sexual and gender-based violence. Hundreds of thousands of victims – mostly women – finally dared to speak out. Among them: Simone Biles. The quadruple Olympic gymnastics champion is one of the hundred young women attacked by Larry Nassar, the doctor of the American national team. “There are many reasons why I was hesitant to share my story, but now I know it’s not my fault”she wrote on Twitter, January 15, 2018.
In France, the testimony of Sarah Abitbol led to a flood of revelations, in almost all disciplines. As of December 31, 2021, the Ministry of Sports unit responsible for processing reports of violence identified 655 people implicated in 610 cases89% of which concern acts of a sexual nature. “The time for omerta, silence, loneliness is over”declared during the presentation of these figures, on March 9, Roxana Maracineanu, then minister in office. “I did not imagine that there were so many dramatic situations in our sporting field, I who had the chance, during my career, to never experience such atrocities”added the former swimmer.
In October 1991, hammer thrower Catherine Moyon de Baecque filed a complaint against members of the French athletics team after being sexually assaulted during a training camp. Three men will receive suspended prison sentences; it will be rejected by the sports world. “I can affirm that this type of aggression still exists and [qu’elles] are covered, she assured on France 2, in 1998. There is a long labor [à faire] (…) to change this situation. »
Special relationship to the body
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