A children’s judge for seventeen years and a committed figure in the fight against violence, Edouard Durand co-chairs with social worker Nathalie Mathieu the independent commission on incest and sexual violence against children. This body is responsible for developing proposals for a public policy of prevention and fight against incest. She began her work in a particular context: that of the explosion produced by the book La Familia grande by Camille Kouchner and the thousands of testimonies published in the wake on social networks, at the origin of an awareness within society of the terrible banality of incest and its ravages.
It is precisely by relying on the testimonies of the victims that the commission, made up of researchers, actors in the field and associations, will draw its legitimacy in order to imagine tools to fight against this violence.
Since your appointment in January as co-chair of the independent commission on incest and sexual violence against children, what have been your priorities?
We wanted to start very quickly, and that’s what we did. On January 23, the President of the Republic appointed us, Nathalie Mathieu and myself, to head the commission. It was installed on March 11 by Adrien Taquet [secrétaire d’Etat chargé de la protection de l’enfance], with short-term and longer-term objectives, but which need to be organized as early as possible. This is particularly the case with the testimonial collection platform that we will launch on September 21, and our program of research, study and collection of good practices.
We have started the expert hearings as well as the field visits and, since June, we have started to receive victims of sexual violence during childhood. These are people, mainly women, who prepared what they wanted to tell us. At the same time that they express a very great suffering, they express a very impressive force, of the order of the vital impulse, of life as combat, and of life as solidarity and help. We see the very important energy that this requires of them, which is accompanied by a very great satisfaction to speak of their personal experience in order to strengthen the protection of children today. This is the most explicit motivation, which leads them to formulate very precise proposals on what should change, based on their experience and their reflection.
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