Gathered in front of the Palace of Justice in Nice on Monday, September 7 at the initiative of the association “Les Petits Invincibles”, activists, victims and families denounced the failures of the judicial system in the face of violence against minors. Between calls to vote for the “integral law” and poignant testimonies, the mobilization highlighted a societal taboo that remains very real.
On the steps of the Palace of Justice in Nice, there were fewer than a hundred of them, placards in hand, alongside photos of victims of assaults during their childhood. To capture the attention of often evasive passersby, the organization called upon a music group and had young Romy sing, who performed Je t’accuse by Suzane, creating a moment of gentleness amid a heavy subject. « In France, 160,000 children are victims of sexual violence each year. That means one child in ten », recalled Anne-Cécile Collet, president of the association Les Petits Invincibles during her speech.
At this time of school reopening, the moment is crucial for the protesters to address prevention and break out of collective indifference.
Faced with national revelations of more than 85,000 complaints pending in police and gendarmerie services, half of which are more than a year old, the urgency on the ground still clashes with administrative slowness. « We recognize the soul of a society by the way it treats its children. And well in France, we don’t have a very beautiful soul », hammered the organizer in front of the gathered crowd.
The ordeal of families facing the slowness of justice and general taboo
On the square, emotion is embodied in the photos attached to the railings but also in the accounts of parents confronted with silence and institutional blockages. The protesters also deplore the lower turnout than at previous mobilizations while there were nearly 300 gathered following the death of little Lyhanna.
A mother interviewed testifies to her ordeal when her son was a victim at age five in first grade. « It’s been five years that we’ve been in court and nothing is moving forward, despite the perpetrator’s confessions », she laments. For her, the school reopening highlights the lack of prevention tools within society, « I asked that at school the subject be addressed in a very childlike way, but explaining to children that their body belongs to them. »
She points to a general reluctance to confront the problem. « It’s a subject that is far too taboo. If you’re not affected, people don’t care. We think it’s only in newspapers, in crime news, when in fact it can happen to you from one day to the next. »
The “integral law”, the activists’ roadmap
By way of solutions, the president of the association Les Petits Invincibles hammered in her speech the importance of supporting the “Integral Law” project, discussed by around sixty deputies. The demands focus on accelerated investigations with a maximum period of three months to hear victims, mandatory training for all people working with minors and systematic checks of interveners. But beyond the texts, it is the allocation of real budgets that is demanded. « We want resources. We want money! », launched the speaker at the microphone, refusing that awareness be limited to « a piece of paper that we’re going to put on school tables at the start of the school year. »
Before parting, participants were invited to write their messages on blank sheets to gather them in an envelope addressed directly to the Ministry of the Interior by registered mail, affirming their determination to maintain citizen pressure.
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