It is the second structure of its kind. A reception center for child victims of incest has started its activity in Paris, pending the opening of premises transformed into a living space in early 2024, the Doctors Bru Association told AFP on Tuesday. It already manages a pioneer establishment of this type in Agen. This social children’s home (MECS) will eventually be able to accommodate 25 people aged 8 to 21, entrusted by a children’s judge to the City of Paris on his departmental skills.
The real deployment will take place in January 2024, when a former nursery school in the center of the capital will become, after work, the “Nicole Bru reception house”. Dr. Nicole Bru, former CEO of the pharmaceutical group Upsa, founded the Jean Bru house in Agen in 1996, until now the only reception center of its kind in France. Reserved so far for young girls, it opens at the beginning of March an annex for seven boys aged 10 to 14 years. In an interim report published in March 2022, the Ciivise estimates that 160,000 minors are victims of sexual violence each year, 10% of whom are boys.
Already two girls in care since mid-February
In the main living unit of 17 places, boys and girls – accommodated separately – will have a dining room, a living room. “And everyone will have their own room and the key to their room. It’s a first step in rebuilding their intimacy,” explains Nathalie Mathieu, general manager of the association, to whom the Paris City Hall has entrusted the project.
In mid-February, the association began to take care of its first two victims of intra-family sexual violence, two girls aged 10 and 12, in an apartment in the 13th arrondissement. By mid-March, they will be four, while four boys will be housed in another apartment in the tenth arrondissement.
A structure for “Parisian children” only
The average stay for a child is two years. Unlike the Agenais center which welcomes children from elsewhere, the Parisian establishment will only welcome “Parisian children”, a request from the City “which wants to devote its efforts to the children entrusted to it”, according to Nathalie Mathieu. The City of Paris, which finances child protection structures as a department (around 8,700 children and an annual budget of 400 million euros), voted in June 2021 to create this home for a budget of 2 million. euros.
The supervisors (educators, supervisors, social assistance, psychomotrician, nurse, psychologist and administration), numbering around fifteen at the start, will eventually be around thirty, specifies Nathalie Mathieu, also co-president of the Independent Commission on Incest and sexual violence against children (Ciivise).