The compensation committee for victims of Lille offenses allocates 50,000 euros to each, although it was seized beyond legal deadlines. She judged that the two women had been unable to do it on time.
by Florence TRAULLÉ (Lille, correspondent)
They are now 51 years old. Catherine and Elisabeth G. are twins and the last of a siblings of six. They grew up in a village in the Lille metropolis, in a family described as “model” by relatives. They were victims of an eight -year -old brother. He started raping them when they were 6 years old in 1977. Their ordeal lasted seven years until the brother left the family home. Catherine did not know what Elisabeth suffered, and vice versa.
“Their brother imposed silence to them, threatening to attack the other twin if one of them spoke”, explains M e Carine Delaby-Faure, their lawyer. They killed themselves, and grew up ignoring that they were both victims of rape and violence. Acts terribly described in the decision that the compensation committee for victims of offenses (CIVI) of Lille rendered on Wednesday January 11. Present in each judicial court, CIVI can be seized by victims of offenses whose damage cannot be compensated by the author or other organizations.
We had to wait until Catherine was 24 years old and hospitalized in a very serious mental suffering state so that she finally begins to speak. She then tells her ordeal to the medical team and the secret, carried for all these years by the two sisters, explodes. A family council is held a few weeks later. Their mother warns: she will not survive the incarceration of her son. Moral blackmail takes place and traps the binoculars. The family omerta prevails. We are in 1995.
“A foreclosure statement”
In 2020, Catherine and Elisabeth walked in their approach. They are aimed at M e Delaby-Faure, known to intervene regularly in rape or violence files for women. The Lille lawyer contacted the brother who, in a laconic four lines, in January 2021, acknowledges having violated his young sisters but declares that he does not have the means to compensate them. On June 28, 2021, Catherine and Elisabeth file a complaint. From now on, parents and a sister abound in their sense and their brother recognized before the gendarmes these years of incest inflicted on his sisters. But these crimes are prescribed.
In the classification letter without follow -up for this reason, in November 2021, the prosecution specifies that “the facts revealed or denounced constitute an offense”. It is then theoretically too late to grasp CIVI: it must be in the three years following the facts or in that which follows a court decision. However, CIVI can exceptionally accept a request presented outside the deadline for a legitimate reason: if the victim has not been able to assert his rights in time, or if he has suffered an aggravation of his damage.
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