PARIS – Testimonies came in hundreds.
“I was 8, I was abused by my uncle,” says a post on Twitter. “My father, aged 7 to 14,” said another tweet. “It was supposed to be a vacation, which quickly turned into a nightmare,” posted another person.
A scandal involving a prominent French intellectual accused of sexually abusing his teenage stepson has sparked a wave of testimonials on social media from people in France who claim to have been victims of incest, shedding light on what activists say is a big problem.
Just as the #Metoo movement gained momentum on social media three years ago, France’s current calculation of incest was driven by a hashtag, #Metooinceste, under which about 20,000 tweets were posted on Monday afternoon. Hundreds of posts were painful reports from people who said they were sexually abused as children by adult family members.
“Victims’ voices are getting louder,” said Patrick Loiseleur, vice president of Facing Incest, a French organization that advocates for better recognition of the extent of the problem. French law defines incest as a sexual relationship between two people related to each other to a degree where marriage is prohibited, including between brothers or between stepfathers and stepchildren. But French law criminalizes incest only in the case of sexual abuse, such as rape or sexual intercourse between an adult and a minor.
The deluge of testimonies on Twitter came in the wake of the scandal surrounding Olivier Duhamel, a prominent political scientist and TV commentator, who has been accused by his stepdaughter Camille Kouchner of abusing his twin since he was 14 . abuse would be considered incest under French law, although the boy was Duhamel’s stepson.
In a book released 11 days ago, “La Familia Grande,” Ms. Kouchner recounts how Duhamel abused her brother at night before going to bed for a period of about two to three years. She writes that her brother, who told her about the abuse, asked her to keep “this secret”.
“The anger didn’t come soon,” writes Kouchner. “The misunderstanding persisted for a long time, followed by silence, for an even longer time.”
A study released in November by Facing Incest and research firm Ipsos found that one in ten French people claims to have been the victim of incest, a proportion that has increased over time as more people are encouraged to perform. According to the research company, the proportion was 3% in 2009 and 6% in 2015.
Brigitte Macron, the French first lady, told TF1, a French TV station, on Sunday: “It is absolutely necessary that these actions are known and that these actions are not silenced.”
Loiseleur said: “Incest is like the elephant in the room that nobody wants to see”, adding: “It is the most widespread form of sexual violence and the least talked about”.
Similar to the scandal surrounding pedophile writer Gabriel Matzneff, the charges against Duhamel caused a significant stir in the French establishment. Mr. Duhamel was a senior figure as head of the board of directors that oversaw the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris and president of “Le Siècle”, an elite social club in the capital. Suspicions have grown over the past two weeks as to who might know about the charges and remain silent.
Frédéric Mion, director of Sciences Po, who according to the newspaper Le Monde has known of the charges since 2018, is under pressure from his students to resign. Élisabeth Guigou, a former justice minister and close friend of Duhamel, resigned last week as head of a sexual violence against children committee, but said she was unaware of the alleged abuse.
Mr Loiseleur said that incest needs to be identified “as a public health problem that requires significant resources”. His organization has long asked authorities to consider incest a specific crime, with no time limit.
France recently extended the statute of limitations for rape against a minor under the age of 20 to 30, and two bills that would create an age of consent for sexual relations with minors will soon be presented for examination in Parliament.
French law prohibits sex between an adult and a child under 15, but it is not automatically considered rape. Other circumstances, such as the use of coercion, threats or violence, are necessary to characterize such sexual relations as rape.
Alexandra Louis, a French lawmaker, said she was working on a bill that would effectively criminalize incest and strengthen the criminalization of sexual relations between an adult and a child under 15.
In many cases so far, she added: “Incest has no real consequences in terms of criminal punishment.”