Over a period of three days at the end of April, Nathalie (not her real name) persistently tried to get through to the 119 emergency hotline in France for alerting the authorities to cases of violence against children. But, she told Mediapart, it was to no avail. She wanted to report how the 17-year-old girlfriend of her son was apparently the victim of violence perpetrated by her brother. In frustration at not being able to reach an operator of the national hotline service, she contacted, via Facebook, the junior minister in charge of child protection, Adrien Taquet.
“Monsieur, it’s now been three days that I have been trying to report an adolescent in danger to 119,” she wrote. “It is scandalous to not be able to reach them. A service overwhelmed. What can one do?” It was on her 11th attempt that she was finally able to report the case, and the “punches and kicks” that the teenager had complained of being subjected to.
Nathalie told the woman operator who took her call that the girl had herself called the hotline a few days earlier, when she had been told simply to call the emergency medical intervention service, the SAMU, the next time an incident ocurred. Following the girl's call, no “IP” report was issued – IP being the abbreviation for “information préoccupante”, a procedure whereby a disturbing report of violence is sent by the hotline operators to the child protection departments. These are filtered beforehand by a centralised service which evaluates the seriousness of cases reported by the public and also professionals like teachers and doctors. “The operator gave her excuses and told me that it was not normal,” recalled Nathalie. Following her own call, an “IP” report was finally issued.
Contacted by Mediapart, the director in charge of the 119 service, Pascal Vigneron, said that the operators had “to prioritise calls made by minors”, and that adult callers, he admitted, “must persevere”. Over the first five weeks of the lockdown on public movement in France to stem the coronavirus epidemic, a measure which was introduced on March 17th and was finally lifted on Monday, the 119 hotline saw a 35% rise in calls received in comparison with the same period in 2019. During the week beginning April 13th – after the first four weeks of school closure and home confinement of families – a total of 14,531 reports of child abuse were made, at an average of around 2,000 per day.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
“There is more direct violence – hitting – but also insults and psychological violence,” said Vigneron. As for the physically dangerous incidents, these too apparently increased given the two-fold rise in reports passed on to the police by the hotline services. “We call the 17 [police emergency number] on another line and wait until they have arrived beside the minor,” explained Vigneron. According to government statistics, police and gendarmerie visits to homes where domestic violence has been reported rose year-on-year by 48% over the period between March 16th, the eve of the lockdown, and April 12th.
Press reports have highlighted two horrific cases of children who died from violence at home since the lockdown began. The first of the two, in early April, was that of six-year-old Daoudja, whose father, already convicted of violence against one of his daughters, claimed he had slapped the boy at the family home in the Paris suburb of Tremblay-en-France, after which his son fell and hit his head on a table. A subsequent autopsy found the child had died from a brain haemorrhage. The second case was that of a four-year-old boy, who died earlier this month from a head injury at his father’s home in Brittany, north-west France. The father and his female partner were both placed under investigation for involuntary homicide.
But already, according to a report published by France’s general inspectorate for social affairs, IGAS, during the period 2012-2016 one child died on average every five days from violence committed by their parents. For French psychologist Karen Sadlier, specialised in problems of domestic violence, “with the stress of the lockdown and the health crisis there is an increase in violent acts, as already documented for example in situations of war”.
While the health crisis took hold rapidly, the question remains as to whether sufficient resources were unblocked to cope with the predictable explosion in domestic violence. Concerning the 119 hotline services, the office of junior minister in charge of child protection issues, Adrien Taquet, underlined in a reply to Mediapart the widespread multimedia campaign of awareness to the problem it launched on TV, radio, Twitter and the video sharing site TikTok. It also said extra staff had been hired for the hotline – which existed before the current crisis – and the introduction of overtime at the service (the ministry’s lengthy statement in reply to Mediapart’s questions can be seen in full, in French, here or by clicking on the “More” tab at the top of this page).
But for jurist Michèle Créoff, a member of the French national council for the protection of children, the CNPE, which operates under the auspices of the prime minister’s office and is presided by the health ministry, “it is incredible that an appeal is made to citizens [to call] 119 when there is no guarantee that professionals will in turn be given the mission of carrying out home visits”. She was referring to the 'social aid for children' public agency, the ASE, with branches across France’s départements (counties) and which are not only responsible for filtering and categorising the reports of violence made in calls to the 119 hotline, but also of monitoring situations in hostels and foster homes where children are placed by the justice system, and within families. “In the best-organised départements, there are teams on call to make urgent home visits when violence has been recorded, but this is not generalised,” said Créoff.
Lyes Louffok is a social worker who was himself placed in public care when a child. He noted that some of the regional units in charge of filtering and assessing the “IP” reports, called “cellules de recueil des informations préoccupantes”, or CRIP, were working below the required capacity. As an example, he cited an automatic email reply he received after contacting the Paris region CRIP on April 24th, which stated: “The CRIP is working with limited staff […] It is therefore requested that there be no further transmissions of non-urgent emails, IPs, evaluation reports, stage reviews.” The automatic reply was later rephrased. “When one says ‘Call 119, it can save lives’ it is not true, it saves lives if the services have the means to function,” said Louffok said.
The coronavirus crisis, and notably the lockdown, have led to courts operating at about 20% of their usual capacity. On April 22nd, the justice ministry announced that 92 children had been “urgently” placed in care since the middle of March when the lockdown was introduced. Contacted by Mediapart, the justice ministry declined to respond to the question of whether these were the total number or just some of the children recommended to be placed in provisional care by the prosecution services, or those placed in care on the order of a judge.
The figure appeared surprisingly low given that statistics for normal periods show that more than 15,000 children are placed in care on the orders of judges every year in France. However, it is possible that during the lockdown some reports of child abuse, such as those usually made by education staff, have fallen in number.
Among the urgent care orders decided over the recent period by judges, 11 involved children placed in a temporary hostel in the Indre-et-Loire département in central France run by an independent foundation called Action Enfance, which manages several such structures around the country. “It is a question of life or death for some,” said the foundation’s director François Vacherat. “We have received children for who the lockdown exacerbated the violence [that was] already known, or not, to the authorities.”
Anaïs Vrain, a children’s affairs judge based at the large courthouse in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre, said the justice system is poorly prepared to deal with the problem. “The plan put in place to manage urgent cases is not at all sufficient,” she told Mediapart. “Those who suffer are the children who cannot be protected. We live with that, we sleep with that.”
Vrain would like to be able to interview and involve families more in the cases she has recently been dealing with, but the lockdown led to far fewer court hearings, which were limited to only the very serious cases of violence against children when the prosecution services gave urgent care order recommendations. “For the other situations, it’s on a case-by-case basis and the hierarchy calls us to account if we decide on a hearing,” said Vrain, speaking shortly before the lockdown was lifted. “Our big problem is all those cases that are not the day’s emergency but which cannot wait either until the end of lockdown, like violence between parents which has the potential of violence committed against the children. In normal times, we summon the families, we see each other at the hearing. It allows for taking good decisions. But it’s virtually at a standstill just now. There aren’t enough of us to do the job at hand.”
She is also fearful of the situation for children who were the subject of care orders made before the lockdown but which were not implemented. “I have a minor who’s been on the waiting list for two months,” she said. “An appointment for a care home was at last made for May 13th. I wrote an email to an official with the ASE to ask for him to be placed as fast as possible given the violence between him and his mother.”
In some départements, the usual evaluations of cases carried out by the ASE offices have also been delayed because of the shortage of available staff. One healthcare professional in the south of France, who spoke to Mediapart on condition his name was withheld, told of the case of a 14-month-old baby which was reported by a doctor in January, and which was categorised as an IP – a situation of particular concern. The father was suspected of assaulting the infant, who is looked after alternately by his separated parents. An official evaluation of the gravity of the case and the subsequent action to be taken was initially to have been made at the end of April, but the mother was informed that the evaluation could finally not be completed before the end of June. “There is the risk that the father could carry out the extreme,” said the healthcare professional. “This delay of six months for a wee one of 14 months is placing him in extreme danger.” As a result, he alerted the prosecution services.
In its reply to Mediapart last week, the office of junior minister for child protection Adrien Taquet said it was “too soon” to draw conclusions over “eventual” failures in the chain of the child protection system, adding that “the period of the lifting of the lockdown should allow the the retrospective analysis of the functioning of the whole chain of prevention and response to violence”. It added that France’s national observatory for the protection of children, the ONPE, had already been tasked with “notably” analysing the actions of the CRIP.
For Pascal Vigneron, head of the 119 hotline services, a highly vulnerable group is “all the children aged below eight years who don’t have access to communication”. He said the social services, crèches and others were involved in attempting to elaborate a plan for identifying the violence that was hidden during the lockdown. “It is possible that infant mortality figures have evolved,” he said.
Lyes Louffok has contacted the child protection junior ministry to advise that they apply particular attention to the potential victims among babies. He gave a chilling warning: “In the months after lockdown there must be a generalisation of post-mortem examinations on infants because otherwise there is the danger of ‘invisible’ murders.”
Isabelle Debré, president of the association L’Enfant Bleu, which offers psychological and legal support to child victims of domestic violence in France, was also apprehensive about what reality would emerge after the lifting of the lockdown. “We are at risk of discovering physical, psychological and sexual abuse,” she said. Martine Brousse, head of another child protection association, La voix de l’enfant, shared that fear of “lockdowned violence” as she called it. “What will we discover when the doors are re-opened?”
Judge Vrain warned: “We are going to find ourselves with a massive number of cases at the lifting of lockdown, without any extra judges or clerks. It will be untenable.” Psychologist Lionel Bauchot, an expert witness for the courthouse in Grenoble, south-east France, added: “I fear that the child protection services will be completely overwhelmed, with exhausted teams.”
Psychologist Karen Sadlier, spcialised in domestic violence, foresees “an explosion in evaluation requirements of assaulted children […] But it must be decided whether they should be placed [in care] or not. The insufficiency of the means available to the ASE has worsened with the lockdown, and we’re going to face the lack, already catastrophic, of places in hostels and with foster families”.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse