“There are two nightmares in my story”: the association “Face à incest” is launching a communication campaign this Thursday to demand that the law be rewritten, so that a child victim of incest no longer has to prove he was not consenting.
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“Together let's act to change the law.
Sign the petition ”, proclaims this campaign, launched in the press, on the web and on television, in a context marked by the Olivier Duhamel affair, accused of incestuous rape of his stepson, and a wave of testimonies victims under the hashtag #MeTooInceste.
The fact of asking a child "if he was okay with having sexual acts with a member of his family", "it is simply unbearable and we have been fighting against this legal aberration for 20 years", Isabelle Aubry, president of Face à incest, explained in a press release.
In addition, asking the question of consent "sends a negative symbolic message", leaving children to think that they "must protect themselves" and "cannot rely on the law", she lamented.
"Are you even sure you said no?"
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In the campaign's video spots - cartoons produced by the production company Jungler with New York illustrator Jackson Edward Joyce - a child victim recounts perpetually living "two nightmares".
The spots send back to back the sexual predator ("Shadow in the night, it is when the whole house is asleep that he slips into my bed"), and the magistrate "supposed to protect" the child, but who asks him "Are you even sure you said no?"
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The issue of consent to sexual acts committed on minors should be on the Senate's agenda on Thursday: the upper house should examine a bill to create a new sex crime to protect minors under the age of thirteen.
This new offense of a sexual crime against a minor would be based on taking into account the young age of the victim without it being necessary to establish his absence of consent.
Debate in the Assembly
Other texts are also in preparation at the National Assembly, including one by LREM MP Alexandra Louis who recently estimated, in an evaluation report of the Schiappa law of 2018 on sexual and gender-based violence, that the current legislation does not "mark a prohibition strong enough".
Today, a conviction for rape or sexual assault supposes that the judges demonstrate the absence of consent through the concepts of "violence, threat, constraint or surprise".
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The 2018 law specified that, when the facts concern a minor under the age of 15, "moral constraint or surprise are characterized by the abuse of the vulnerability of the victim who does not have the necessary discernment for these acts".
But associations consider this precision insufficiently protective.