In recent weeks, not a day goes by without reports of fires everywhere in Côte-d’Or. 90% of them are of human origin. Some of these are voluntary acts. Arsonists that the police sometimes manage to arrest. This is the case, a week ago with the arrest of three minors aged 13 to 17 in Longvic at the origin of three fire starts on 600 square meters of wasteland in the industrial zone of the town. Teenagers or young adults who are the main arsonists according to Denis Prieur, expert psychiatrist at the Dijon Court of Appeal.
As justice wishes, each arsonist is brought to be heard by a psychiatric expert. For 13 years, Denis Prieur has therefore regularly faced arsonists. Arsonists who are not, as one might imagine, arsonist firefighters. “They don’t have a pathology, an illness like schizophrenia or whatever. We are faced with personalities that are most often immature, rather poorly put together, not yet completely structured with a fragility of identity, difficulties in social, friendly and professional integration. Very often their intelligence is in the basic limit of the norm with individuals who are mainly boys between 15 and 25 years old. says the doctor.
“Very often he comes back to see”
The passage to the act always translates in these individuals a bad passage with an additional difficulty such as a job which has just escaped him or difficulties in finding one, or even a friendly break-up, sometimes in love. A fire outbreak which is not however the translation of a fascination for fire and its destructive power. “They are much more interested in mobilizing social forces like the gendarmes and firefighters, the mayor and passers-by. that is happening”adds Denis Prieur.
Repeat arsonists
For the arrested arsonists, the doctor specifies that they often recognize their act and present themselves as “ashamed to have been caught and discovered. They do not claim their passage to the act”. A delinquent passage to the act which gives rise to recurrence rates between 10 and 40% assure l’expert. “We sometimes find antecedents in them that perhaps had not been discovered.”
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