A mother who allegedly helped her boyfriend rape her four-year-old son during a prison visit has gone on trial in France, reports Sky News.
Sabrina Bonner, 25, and the boy's stepfather, Lionel Barthelemy, 31, are charged with multiple sexual assaults on the child, who is now eight and in care.
It has been claimed they carried out the rape in the prison after covering the windows of the meeting room with black bin liners.
Barthelemy has already admitted raping the boy, but he says that he only did so once after the act was prompted by Bonner.
The boy's mother is also accused of sexually assaulting the boy at other times, filming those attacks and giving the recordings to Barthelemy while he was in jail.
Schizophrenic Barthelemy was serving a three-year jail sentence for domestic abuse of his girlfriend at the time.
Bonner says the prison incident and other rapes she filmed were carried out after her partner threatened her with violence if she did not comply.
The trial, which is due to run for three days in Strasbourg, is threatening to expose a culture in French prisons which meant staff failed to notice an act of such brutality taking place.
It is understood that prisoners were often allowed a degree of privacy for visits from partners, even though Bonner's visit was supposed to be supervised because he was in jail for domestic violence and had been diagnosed with schizophrenic tendencies.
Yannick Pheulpin, a solicitor representing the boy, says that after the trial is over he may initiate action against the jail, in Toul, near Nancy, eastern France.
Read more of this report from Sky News.