Incest victims, a mother and her daughter break the mechanics of silence

In the big old pink box full of photos, we pick up Christmas banquets, candles that we blow out, children with bowls at the table in the kitchen.

And then there's this cliché: the whole family, in a row of onions on a manicured lawn.

In the background, proud and new, stands the house with its wooden cladding, so modern in the early 1980s, in the village of Saint-Loup (Manche).

"We were a good family in all respects", squeaks Anne-Marie, the eldest of the five sisters born from the marriage at 18 years of Thérèse, the effaced mother, occupied between terrines and knitting, and Augustus, the patriarch of nine years her elder, "the benchmark" of the tribe.

A man "brilliant in society, versatile in private", a former poor child who became a teacher, director of a technical high school, and even an academic palms officer.

A recognized figure in this land of Mont-Saint-Michel, which hesitates between Brittany and Normandy.

A fearful and charismatic father.

A pious man invited to read the Bible on Sunday at church.

He fell at 85, when the gendarmes put him in handcuffs, putting an end to an incestuous mechanism that killed at least six victims in the family: Caroline (the name has been changed), Anne-Marie's younger sister , whom he is accused of having raped when she was 13 years old and until his majority.

Anne-Marie, victim at the same time of her paternal uncle.

She was 14 years old.

Then, a generation later, his daughter Sophie, raped.

Three other grandchildren were touched and sexually exhibited by the grandfather.

He died in pre-trial detention a few months after his arrest in 2005. The investigation was not completed.

For the first time, Anne-Marie and Sophie, mother and daughter, have decided to talk together and with their faces uncovered.

It is their contribution to the liberation of a necessary word, which has surged since Camille Kouchner herself unveiled, in "La Familia grande", a book published on January 7 at Le Seuil, the sexual abuse that she accuses her. stepfather Olivier Duhamel of having committed against his twin brother.

In this testimony, Anne-Marie recognized “so much” of her own story.

A “system” nourished by silences and domination, which disrupts family relationships and consumes individuals.

The "desire to be dead, to stop suffering"

“I feel like a Playmobil mounted upside down.

I'm still scared, I often cry in my room, and I'm 6 again.

I would dream of a normal life, with minivan, dog and flag.

But I'm 42 and I can't do it.

I have the impression that I will always be the little girl who waits for mom to come and deliver her.

Sometimes I want to be dead, to stop suffering, ”says Sophie.

To “put on a normal person's costume” every morning, he often has to lean on the crutch of antidepressants.

Her job as a teacher must regularly be put on hold.

As soon as she looks to the future, tears rise.

“I'm still scared, I often cry in my room, and I'm 6 years old again,” says Sophie./LP/Arnaud Dumontier  

Comfort, she draws it from sport, practiced in high doses, and from this teddy bear that she has just bought, a carbon copy of her old childhood blanket.

And in the round and warm presence of Anne-Marie, of course.

Mother and daughter share the same direct gaze, the same worry line in the middle of the forehead, framed by blond locks.

"We met for breakfast as if nothing had happened"

Even after Augustus' death, lies battled with truth, in the family.

"He did not do that bad things ... and then we could not help loving him", still defended his wife, "grandma Thérèse", until her death three years ago.

This lonely woman has closed her eyes for decades, and blamed her children for "stirring up the shit".

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“She may also be our father's first victim.

And the notions of consent, of protecting the aggressor… that doesn't exist when you experience incest.

We're in it, that's all.

It's internal, an order of operation that goes well beyond the sexual act, ”insists Anne-Marie, glancing at her notes.

From her career as a teacher and trade unionist, the 72-year-old retiree has kept this habit of noting the “important points” to be addressed.

A family photo with the grandparents.

“We were a good family in all respects,” grins Anne-Marie.

/ DR  

The fleeting thought that something was wrong crossed Anne-Marie when she was a young girl.

Nothing more.

“Some nights, our father came to Caroline and Estelle's room (the names have been changed).

He would tell Estelle to go to sleep with her mother, and he would go to bed with Caroline.

In the morning, we all met for breakfast as if nothing had happened.

"

"I never would have thought of telling my parents!"

At that time, the eldest child developed a stubborn jealousy towards her little sister, 13, the father's “favorite”.

The one who has the right to watch television at night, later than the others.

The one who is offered new clothes, in a chic store in Caen, when other girls have to be satisfied with hand-sewn skirts.

“She was his little wife.

When they took our little sister's pram in the street, people could believe that she was the mother, ”says Anne-Marie.

Thérèse, for her part, is cloistered at home, in the grip of a deep depression.

At 14, Anne-Marie thinks of filling the emotional void left by her so distant parents, when, she says, her uncle René (the first name has been changed) begins to cajole her by calling her "Mimi".

On holidays, he asks her to accompany him to the cellar to get a bottle of cider.

There, he "fiddles" with her, she thinks.

Fifty years later, she realized in therapy that it was rape.

“It happened ten times, I didn't see what was wrong at the time, I discovered something that gave pleasure.

I never would have thought of telling my parents!

Then we went back up with everyone.

As if nothing had happened, again.

"My body did not exist"

This episode, Anne-Marie tells it today like an anecdote, so much her pain is elsewhere, in the guilt of not having been able, not knowing how to protect her own daughter.

A weight that she transforms into energy: ten years ago the fight against incest and support for victims became her associative fight (within the association Le Monde through a look).

Not a week goes by without distributing information and prevention brochures for a high school or a social service.

But in the 1980s, this understanding of sexual violence and its damage to health escaped him.

Everyone wonders about the case of Sophie, this CE1 schoolgirl so in her bubble that she falls from her chair and curls up in a ball under the table, in class.

The little one is terrified of death, clinging to her mother all the time, to the point of sleeping on a mattress at the foot of her bed: thus, she can hold her hand in her sleep.

"So let go of Sophie a little!"

Repeat uncles and aunts.

“She has to shake herself off.

Anne-Marie puts these behaviors on the account of deaths that have occurred in those around them, and on her relationship problems.

For a long time, her marriage has been in decline, and Sophie has rarely seen her father.

A childhood photo of Sophie./DR  

There is also this sudden weight gain, around the age of 7, which, in her twenties, will cause Sophie to exceed 100 kg.

She will undergo several operations to reconstruct a body changed into a "log".

“When I imagined myself, I was just a head.

My body did not exist.

As a teenager, I became the funny guy on duty, it's the easiest role when you're fat, ”explains Sophie.

She connects with men met on the Internet, abuses alcohol, multiplies unprotected sex.

Memories resurface when speech is released

For almost 20 years, the young woman consulted psychiatrists and doctors, she accumulated treatments without the issue of incest ever being addressed.

She herself, in post-traumatic shock, had erased her childhood.

It was at the age of 27 that his memory came back to him, as violently as the water gushes, when his aunt Caroline, the first, broke the barrier of silence.

That day in September 2005, she revealed to her sisters the rapes she suffered as a teenager.

One by one, the dominoes fall.

Anne Marie.

A niece.

Of them.

Three.

Anne-Marie summons her two children, the eldest Romain (the first name has been changed) and the younger Sophie, to reveal the truth about their grandfather.

“I didn't have time to finish my sentence when Sophie yelled:

so I'm not crazy, I'm not sick!

"

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In Sophie's brain, traumatic memories surge.

“I saw the texture of her skin, her dry body, the green carpet I hated in the bedroom, the hiding places.

At my grandparents' house, I hid all the time.

He still found her.

And granny?

"She was at the hairdresser a lot ..."

"We don't have to bear this shame"

By flashes, Sophie reconstructs these hours spent after school in the house of Saint-Loup.

It is a sordid picture that must be looked in the face.

This brown armchair in the living room.

The little one perches there to scrutinize, through the window, the darkness which falls on the rue du Lait-Bouilli.

The glass is cool on her cheek, and this cold contact reassures the child.

She watches the headlights of her mother's car, which she is desperately waiting for.

Two hours earlier, Papi Auguste came out of the bathroom with her, after having taken care of re-styling her.

Between the sink and the bidet, he raped her.

"Sucks, it's like ice cream," he explained the first time.

According to what Augustus confessed to the gendarmes, the first abuses started when she was 3 years old.

The assaults were violent.

Her private parts were bleeding.

“Very young, I learned to manage, in the bathroom.

He was squeezing my neck too, there are gestures by which I thought I was dying.

But there were no traces.

For him, I think I was an object.

A thing ".

No love in there.

Never.

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Several times a year, Auguste took his car and left "two hours away, in Mayenne or elsewhere", to go to confession in distant churches.

But it was with Sophie that he went to his parish regularly.

“He stood behind me and put me in front of the statue of the Virgin.

"And intimated to him:" Now you are going to ask forgiveness for what I did to you.

"

“We don't have to bear this shame,” says Anne-Marie firmly today.

Together, mother and daughter did their part to reverse the guilt: they laid the burden.