Write about your suffering rather than talking about it. Since 2018, the association “Les Papillons” collect the words of children who are victims of violence via 250 mailboxes located in schools and after-school settings. In June 2022, a ten-year-old girl, Lily, slipped a note into one of the boxes to denounce her incestuous grandfather in her words. He will be tried at the end of September 2024 before the Ain criminal court.
“This device saved my daughter”
The testimonies collected in these boxes are examined by psychologists who can provide worrying information or if the danger is serious and imminent, directly notify the public prosecutor, as Laurent Boyer, the founder of the association, explains to France Info.
A victim of fraternal incest from the age of 6 to 9, he explains that he wanted to found the association “to give meaning to his personal history but above all to reach out to the thousands of children victims each year of child abuse. »
Although he has remained in contact with little Lily’s family, this is not the case every time, depending on the families’ wishes. He reports that “50% of the testimonies correspond to school harassment, 23% to intra-family physical violence and around 8% to situations of intra-family sexual violence. »
“There should be these mailboxes everywhere, it saved my daughter,” says Lily’s mother. from BFM TV.