There are five children, aged between 12 and 2, when they confide in investigators at the end of 2021. They are heard because their father is suspected of having beaten their mother. The latter will be sentenced to an awareness course against violence in the couple. But the case won’t stop there.
Puppies have a lot of scars on their bodies. And they describe almost daily violence against them, beaten with a phone charger cord. The elder describes other abuses. He explains that her mother grinds pepper and that she rubs it on her sex to punish her. His cadets also evoke the use of pepper on their eyes, their mouths in response to “their great nonsense”.
double penalty
The children won’t go to their parents’ trial on Tuesday, but their word painfully resounds in the Thionville Criminal Courtroom. The family left Senegal to settle in Spain, then in the Paris region, then in the Fensch valley. The father and mother say they want to protect the girls from excision, to protect all the brothers.
The five finished first. They just returned to the family home in East Moselle now. Except the major. “She doesn’t want it,” said Me Bouillard, the lawyer representing the victims. He underlines the double penalty inflicted, “the cruelty of the acts suffered and the separation of brothers and sisters during the placement”. Finally, she is surprised that the parents are being prosecuted for the violence committed against four of their five children, while the youngest, 2 years old at the time of the revelations, also showed significant injuries.
Suspension of the custodial sentence
The defendants cash in, stoic, at the courtroom bar. They are accompanied by an interpreter. They initially denied before admitting their responsibility. The mother asks for forgiveness. She has lost her balance, submerged, isolated. The father pronounces his “total regret”. They invoke the violent education they have undergone and reproduced. The couple is now accompanied by a psychologist. They are followed by a social worker, who visits four times a week.
The defense attorney, Me Lallement-Hurlin, insists on this awareness, welcomes the confessions heard at the hearing. He remembers the chaotic journey of this family fleeing their country, “parents overwhelmed by educational difficulties”. “Their situation is getting regularized,” adds the lawyer. The court, however, rejects his request not to enter the sentence in the criminal record, which until then had remained blank. The judges sentenced the mother to one year with suspended sentence and the father to six months with suspended sentence. They also order them to financially compensate the children for their harm, both moral and physical.
