Un documentary broadcast by France 2 has just recalled the Outreau affair, described for twenty years as a “legal fiasco”. A fiasco for which we designate two responsible: an overly credulous judge and, above all, children accused of having denounced abuses they had not suffered. Two implicated cases which had very different fates, because if the Outreau trial did not lead to questioning the competence of all the magistrates, it threw, and for many years, a major discredit on the children’s speech. A professional – lawyer or caregiver – who affirms the credibility of a child can, even today, be told: “Yes, but still, remember, Outreau…”
However, contrary to what too often is said, the Outreau trial does not demonstrate the lack of credibility of the children’s voices. It demonstrates the ignorance in which adults are of what a child’s speech is. And their even greater ignorance of what this word is when the child who utters it has been subjected to the unthinkable psychic destruction that sexual abuse constitutes for him or – even worse, if possible – incest .
Can we define what a child’s speech is?
A child’s speech begins long before words. From birth, the little man expresses by his cries, his tears or the dysfunctions of his body what he needs to make adults hear, so that they can help him. Obliging them to decrypt, to achieve this, the coded messages that he sends them.
Even when the time for language comes for him, this deciphering remains necessary, because, despite appearances, the child does not speak the same language as the adult. He certainly uses words identical to his own, but he expresses through them a way of feeling, of thinking, of imagining very different from his own; and which, moreover, changes as it develops.
The word of the child is always a text of extreme complexity
And this word must be deciphered all the more because it always bears the mark of the total dependence – material, intellectual and emotional – in which the child finds himself in relation to those around him, and first and foremost his parents. . He can only think according to what they teach him, and moreover understands very quickly that he can, by what he says, satisfy them or, on the contrary, displease them. Understanding which can lead him – because he is afraid of them, wants to protect them or tries, desperately, to obtain their love – to refrain from speaking the truth.
You have 68.19% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.