In the National Assembly, a parliamentary commission of inquiry is currently holding a series of hearings on the judicial treatment of parental incestuous violence committed against children and the situation of protective parents, particularly protective mothers.
The debates focus more broadly on psychological violence against children: incestual climate, psychological influence, coercive control, particularly in a post-marital context. The hearing of psychologist Hélène Romano thus showed that, in a context of conflictual separation, one of the two parents can cut the other off from their children. This is called violation of parentage.
A blind spot in our collective vigilance
Examples: following a difficult separation, Ludovic no longer sees his children, who today live with their mother. Adeline spent years defending herself from her sons’ false accusations, leveled against her by their father, before losing all contact with them. Sylvain felt his daughter’s behavior change, before seeing her take up her mother’s cause and then cut off communication. Hélène fights to let her son, caught in a conflict of loyalties, know that she has never stopped loving him. Sophie grew up with her mother thinking that her father was a monster who should be forgotten. Cut off from half of her family tree and from the love of one of her parents, Lola feels great distress in constructing her identity as a young adult.
All these examples come from the photographic work of Marco Barbon, published under the title The Sun Even at Night. They bear witness to terrible suffering: that of parents cut off from all relationships with their children; those of children deprived of one of their parents. This suffering is today largely invisible. Even, in some cases, denied.
However, the detection of domestic violence has been strengthened. Their scale is now better documented, but their identification remains insufficient. A recent survey by the Ministry of Labor, Health, Solidarity and Families revealed that 74% of those questioned say they have difficulty identifying these situations and feel poorly informed.
Indeed, this violence against children takes multiple forms: physical, sexual, but also psychological and symbolic. Until we clearly identify all forms of abuse, and not just the most obvious ones, they will continue to thrive in the blind spot of our collective vigilance.
A worrying polarization
In certain severe parental conflicts, it happens that a child is subjected to such pressure from one of his parents that he comes to break all ties with the other parent – and often with an entire part of his family, against whom he has no real grievance. Sometimes even, his entire perception of reality is biased, consciously or not, by one of his parents. The child then becomes the instrument of an adult war waged in his name.
Child protection should be a territory of absolute consensus. It has become the scene of a worrying polarization. Violence resulting from psychological control or manipulation, more insidious than physical attacks, often remains ignored.
Talking about these situations has become explosive. Words themselves have become traps. However, behind the semantic quarrels, there is a reality: situations where fathers and mothers, in heterosexual couples as in homosexual couples, exercise psychological manipulation on their child(ren) so that the latter cuts ties with the other parent, thus creating a situation of exclusion, or even symbolic disaffiliation.
Psychological abuse
The public debate has recently become tense around a dangerous opposition: defense of mothers versus defense of fathers, feminists versus masculinists. This binary logic infiltrates institutions and places magistrates as well as all child protection professionals in a climate of ideological suspicion. By opposing causes and simplifying complex realities, we risk losing sight of what should remain our common compass: the best interests of the child.
Choosing one camp against the other would mean, for institutions, losing sight of the protection of the most vulnerable. Because not recognizing a form of violence, whatever it may be, is letting it prosper. It is neither a question of opposing the rights of mothers to those of fathers, nor of prioritizing violence, but of naming a phenomenon: the control and manipulation over children is invisible and silent violence which amounts to psychological abuse.
We call on public authorities to promote a discourse of appeasement and truth. There is an urgent need to support academic research into these control mechanisms. To strengthen the training of magistrates, lawyers and all justice and children professionals so that they can evaluate each situation on a case-by-case basis. Because when a child is exploited, unfairly deprived of a parent or cut off from part of his family, it is his balance, his identity and his future that are at stake – and, through him, that of our society.
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