A child is the victim of sexual violence every three minutes in France, according to the Minors' Office. For 15 years, psychologist Joanna Smith worked with sexual offenders.
In her book Protecting your child from sexual violence, she gives the risks run by minors and provides information on the profile and operating methods of the attackers, to best equip... parents. The idea is not to fall into psychosis - we are not surrounded by the idea of protecting children from violence, says Smith. In reality, we still suffer from many preconceived ideas on the subject, she says. In therapy, victims say that their first sexual relationship was with a 35-year-old woman when they were 8; they present it as an initiation as something rewarding, she writes. One in 5 molesters children under 12 are committed by a woman, she adds, because it is absolutely not easy to present the act as a sexual violence committed by women. For a third of female victims of. sexual violence in the family, the aggressor is the father or stepfather.