With its dedicated dates and days, the calendar knows how to be playful behind its well-oiled mechanics. This year, the Ministry of National Education is organizing the national day against bullying at school this Thursday, November 9. Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne and Minister of National Education Gabriel Attal will speak at Claude Debussy, a Parisian high school.
A few hundred kilometers away, the legal future of a school bullying case is being sealed. At the Mulhouse judicial court (Haut-Rhin), an investigating judge appointed before the summer opened a judicial investigation and received this Thursday morning the family of Dinah Gonthier, one year after the filing of a complaint with constitution of party civil and after an initial dismissal of the case.
“We want to be taken seriously this time”
Aged 14, the young girl committed suicide at her family home in Kingersheim on the night of October 4 to 5, 2021, when she had just returned to second grade in Mulhouse. For the parents and Rayan, Dinah’s older brother, there is no doubt: the young girl took action because of school harassment, and the justice system must recognize this. “We want to be taken seriously this time,” warned the 23-year-old.
“I expect listening and judicial courage,” says Me Boutron-Marmion, the family’s lawyer. We want new investigations, particularly concerning the exploitation of Dinah’s telephone. We are also expecting more in-depth hearings with certain protagonists, including the head of the establishment. »
Because since that tragic night, the legal marathon has tested the family. It all started in fourth grade, recalls Rayan, who identified two causes of school harassment: the personality of his younger daughter and her sexual orientation. “My sister was a girl who talked a lot, who loved school, who was very intelligent, who always asked for more. It can have a way of annoying people, you know how things go at school,” explains the philosophy student.
The parents claim to have alerted National Education on several occasions
Her sister also questioned whether she “liked girls or boys.” She confided in a group of friends who blew “hot and cold with them”, before denigrating her. “She was stigmatized for being the intellectual, then for the lesbian,” summarizes Rayan, who did not live at the family home at the time of the events, but remembers having noticed several changes in her younger daughter: disturbed sleep, loss weight. Worried, the family alerted the college several times. “The problem comes from your daughter, not from us,” retorted the establishment, which pushed them to go and consult, Rayan recalls. “We did it, Dinah was followed by a psychologist, she went I don’t know how many times to the doctor. But she no longer wanted to go to school, and said so. »
The young girl tried to end her life for the first time in March 2021. “What’s crazy is that everything is there in this affair, the harassment is everywhere,” complains Rayan. After this first alert, he remembers that his sister took and passed her secondary school certificate, before going to Morocco for the summer holidays. Then, at the start of the school year, upon encountering the group of harassers again, Dinah’s health deteriorated again according to her brother.
A new hope after a classification without follow-up
The deceased teenager, a complaint was filed in November 2021 by the family and the Mulhouse public prosecutor’s office launched an investigation into harassment and research into the causes of death. The legal action is dismissed in September 2022. “Many procedures are dismissed before being reopened,” explains Me Boutron-Marmion. It was not this ranking that was painful, but the way it was managed. Today, for cases of harassment, I think that would no longer be possible.”
Rayan remembers being present in class, before being interrupted by a series of calls. “The journalists told me live about the classification without further action, just after a press conference. We didn’t know about it. » From that day, the young man had this painful feeling, “as if someone had killed my sister a second time”.
Appointed this summer as Minister of National Education, Gabriel Attal made school bullying one of his priorities, unveiling a plan last September to fight against this scourge. The former Minister of Public Accounts also wanted a disciplinary procedure to be launched against the former rector of Versailles, after the suicide of Nicolas, a harassed high school student. A favorable context at the time of the new examination of Dinah’s file? “The case was solid three years ago, it still is today,” assures Me Boutron-Marmion. But since then, we have observed an awakening of awareness on the subject. I have no doubt that this change will help the case to be handled properly. »