Two generations facing sexual violence in France

“Be the daughter of the victim and it of the aggressor is a terrible load. For four years I have tried to invent a new existence, stripped of all the certainties I have built on. My father is a criminal and I will have to learn to live with that ruthless reality. Accept the painful tear between my need for justice, really, and the love I have been able to feel for him. ” These words are part of the reflections that Caroline Darian Share in your devastating memory And I stopped calling you dad (Seix Barral).

Es A necessary bookas were two titles that made the French elites tremble: The big familyof Camille KouchnerParisian lawyer who broke a long familiar silence by counting his stepfather’s sexual abuse, recognized political scientist Olivier Duhamel, against his twin brother when he was a teenager. The other is Consent, of Vanessa Springorawhere Juliard’s editorial director unveiled as at age 13 was trapped in a sexual relationship of control and manipulation with the intellectual pedophile Gabriel Matzneff, 49.

But Draian’s book is also timely because he focuses, beyond his family collapse and his personal reconstruction, in a very little treated phenomenon: The chemical submission of women with the clear intention of violation and the absence of tools of the public health system to detect the very serious problem.

Dary is the daughter of Gisèle Pélicot, the woman who became a world emblem by deciding that the trial against her ex -husband, Dominique Pélicot, sentenced last December to 20 years in prison, was public and He made a flag of the phrase: “May the shame change the side”alluding to which in 1976 lawyer Gisèle Halimi, a reference for feminism in France, pronounced when he defended the Belgians Anne Tonglet and Araceli Castilian, victims of a group rape.

Pelicot was convicted with almost 50 sexual predatorsamong them a journalist, whom he invited to rape his wife (via a dark website that already discharged), previously knocked out by a mixture of sleeping pills, anxies and drugs that supplied him with food and drink. This was his life during more than a decade.

The trial and his Large coverage in the world press It exempts us from commenting. But it is more relevant to know, because they are less known data, than Gisèle Flelicot counterfeits four ETS (Sexually transmitted diseases) because of the violations (HIV was not infected although one of his condemned rapists was seropositive).

Throughout the book, Caroline Darian narrates, raw as who nakes his soul, his interior process, His posterior trauma, the financial bankruptcy that Pelicot left to his ex -wifeand the positive of joining efforts with specialists and therapists to push changes in the French health system.

There is an interesting point that Dary puts in the debate center: the violation by chemical submission and The little integral response that the victim receives after making his complaint. “Our history will have revealed at least one social phenomenon that is still widely underestimated in France. Chemical submission in the domestic and social sphere is much more widespread than we think. This modus operandi is the favorite weapon of sexual predators. ”

It emphasizes that “from the femicide to the incest, the scandals of recent years show that Cases of sexual violence often imply power dynamics that transform isolated incidents into systemic practices. Unfortunately, chemical submission is no exception to the rule: most victims are women, and almost 70 % of registered cases are sexual aggressions. The private sphere is the first involved in this type of violence. ”

And he adds that, from a sample of 727 reports transmitted in 2021 by the Police through the complaints filed, they were notified 82 cases of chemical submission. The substances used are mostly medications: antihistamines, anxiolytic, sleepy, opiates, MDMA (ecstasy), and GHB, the “rapist’s drug.”

Darian narrates the “therapeutic errance” to which the victims of chemical submission are subjected When they begin to have physical consequences. “The victims shut up, barely convinced of being. Their health deteriorates ”, and while trying to understand what happens to them“ a new suffering begins, because doctors are not formed to recognize chemical submission, therefore, it is never contemplated. Abnormal tiredness, memory lapses, falls, nausea are not considered related to excessive consumption of medications. ”

In the few cases in which there is a suspicion of chemical dependence, “the treatment in the hospital becomes a diagnosis without exit. Toxicological analysis, the only ones capable of revealing the presence of suspicious substances, are unfortunately not de facto integrated into the treatment. Here begins a new viacrucis: The search for expensive evidence, paid by victims. The isolation trap closes and, as the effort to gather evidence is prolonged, the possibility of fileing a complaint fades, ”says the author.

For Caroline Drian, it is no longer just about her mother, Gisèle Pelicot (who has recovered her bachelorette name after the condemnatory trial of her extorturador), but about claim through your book the collaborative action of the judicial system and the health system.

It proposes that the public health system train their doctors and their staff to request specific evidence against symptoms that are alert: tiredness, memory loss, naúseas, unexpected falls, sleep disorders, weight loss, post -traumatic stress, accidents in the Public route, “some of the avoidable risks identified in the National Survey on Chemical Submission.”

How to protect victims without providing proximity professionals from the necessary means to detect this type of violence? How to foster the complaint before the courts without reinforcing the links between justice and health care? Place the victims of chemical submission again in the center remains vital. “Far from being news, this type of violence is a true public health problem,” concludes the author.

After these essential reflections for women of all the age stripes, they would realize the painful process that since 2020 crossed, along with her husband and young son, her mother, her brothers and her sisters -in -law, when brutally discovering the perversion of her father . And although Do not forgive itand has made public in an interview with the BBC following his book, which Wait for it to die in prisonthe book is also a way of gathering the pieces of your life to move on.

The final message is a solidarity reflection: “I want to transform this mud into noble matter. It is necessary to help women already destroyed by sexual violence. There is still much to do in France to support and protect the victims of aggressions and sexual crimes after the presentation of a complaint. ” And it challenges us to “reject the unbearable.”

And I stopped calling you dadby Caroline Drian (Seix Barral).