Lhe Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Against Children (Ciivise) was created in 2021, following the tsunami of testimonies from incest victims on social networks and in the media sparked by Camille Kouchner’s book The big family (Threshold, 2021). Since then, the Ciivise has acted, at multiple levels, with a single objective: to put an end to violence against children.
However, today it is on the verge of disappearing. Has incest been eradicated? The scale of the phenomenon is such that two years of action are obviously not enough.
This is why, collectively, we, the professionals in child protection, equality between women and men and the fight against sexist and sexual violence against women, we, professionals in education and sexual and reproductive health, ask that Ciivise can continue to carry out its action, which is essential for all of our organizations.
School failure, discrimination and gender-based violence
Our jobs, our missions, our commitments are different: we act in the public, private, associative or medico-social sectors. However, we are all concerned and impacted by this same scourge, by the sexual violence suffered by children.
Because this violence is not only intimate and private. Of course, their consequences are first and foremost individual: they are traumatic for the victims and their loved ones, and have a lasting impact on their physical and mental health. But, because they are based on strategies of humiliation and domination, this violence can also damage and compromise relationships with others, install oppression at the heart of human relationships and, ultimately, impact us collectively.
Even if it does not explain everything, this sexual violence can fuel tensions in schools, academic failure, discrimination and sexist, sexual and LGBTphobic violence in middle and high school, but also in the street, at work, at within couples and families…
At our level, we deploy all our energy and skills to try to prevent, support, support and limit damage. But we must recognize that we are helpless in the face of a phenomenon of such magnitude.
Terrifying reality
In this context, the Ciivise has come to provide valuable reinforcement, because it takes the subject head on, in its entirety. Firstly, individually, from victims and their loved ones, to collect their testimony (in just two years, 27,000 victims or co-victims have made their voices heard to finally be considered, heard and believed by a public authority) , recognize their trauma, break their isolation, try to repair them.
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