For more than a decade, Julie has argued that she did not consent to sex with any of the firefighters; in addition to suffering from severe depression, she was only 13 when the violence began. But in France, there is no minimum age for sexual consent, and Julie’s case is the latest episode in an escalating reckoning over what activists call the country’s refusal to protect children from sexual violence. For months, her supporters have staged protests and mobilized on social media with the hashtag “Justice for Julie”—to draw attention not only to her case, they say, but to a legal system that has for decades been complicit in the sexualization of children.When Leriche and Julie filed a complaint with the police in August 2010, the officers asked Julie if she had said ‘No’ when the firefighters instigated sex. “She said she didn’t say ‘no,’ but that she couldn’t defend herself,” Leriche told me. “They said, if you didn’t say no, it’s not rape.” Advocates say Julie’s experience is common, and that filing a complaint for rape in France is a nightmarish process. “Instead of opening an investigation, the police strategy is to jostle the accuser, to be sure she isn’t lying,” said Fatima Ben-Omar, an activist and cofounder of Les effronté·es, a feminist advocacy group. The three firefighters whom Julie accused of gang raping her were ultimately charged with "sexual infraction." The remaining 17, whom she also alleges raped her between 2008 and 2010, face no charges. “She was incredibly vulnerable, and just 13, 14, when it happened,” her mother said. “She was still a child. They saw her with scars on her wrists, they knew the medication she was on. How, in that state, could she have given consent?”“My daughter became their sex object, when they were sent to protect her.”
French professionals from psychiatrists to police officers lack the training necessary to help victims of childhood abuse, Salmona added. “There’s no understanding of the traumatic effects of sexual violence,” both in terms of problems it can cause later in life, and in terms of how trauma affects a victim’s ability to testify. Victims, especially at a young age, can appear disengaged or absent, “which judges mistake for consent,” she explained. “If they weren’t screaming or crying, the judge will say, well, then they didn’t protest, and so they consented.” That’s how Julie’s experience played out. In a recent interview with French news site Médiapart, she recalled being “in such a dissociated state that I almost had no reaction” to questioning, she said. “And the only reactions I had—I was blamed that they weren’t strong enough, and they couldn’t understand that I hadn’t consented. Because I hadn’t yelled out the window, because I didn’t physically fight them, it meant that I had consented.”The three firefighters whom Julie accused of gang raping her were ultimately charged with "sexual infraction." The remaining 17, whom she also alleges raped her between 2008 and 2010, face no charges.
“They say they didn’t know how old she was,” Leriche said. “But they had her medical papers, they were in a position of authority over her. That’s what’s so scandalous, and why her case is beginning to draw attention.”“It sends the message that if you are in the French military, if you are protected by the state, you can commit crimes with impunity.”
The absence of a minimum age for consent in France isn’t for activists’ lack of trying, but progress has been incremental at best. In 2005, France’s highest court ruled that sexual coercion is presumed in cases involving “children of a very young age,” but left the exact age to judges’ discretion; the decision, along with another in 2007, created a precedent that made the de facto consent age six years old, but does still not appear in the current law on sexual violence. A 2010 law states that a significant age difference can lead to “moral coercion,” but again left the details vague. And yet a 2018 survey indicated that a majority of the French public supports a minimum age for consent, especially when an adult is in a position of authority over a child. Sixty-eight percent said that they were unaware that such a law did not exist. In November 2017, shortly after Emmanuel Macron took office, he expressed his support for setting the minimum age for consent at 15. Two months prior, a 28-year-old man was charged with "sexual infraction" after having sex with an 11-year-old girl; his attorneys argued that the girl had consented, unleashing a heated national debate over what constitutes rape. Marlène Schiappa, then the secretary of state for gender equality, pledged to pass a new law that would automatically deem sex with a minor rape. But French courts rejected the legislation on the grounds that it would violate the notion of presumption of innocence. Instead, the law expanded the definition of rape when it comes to minors, indicating that if sex results from “abuse of vulnerability,” it is considered rape. The 2018 law also extended the statute of limitations on rape allegations from 20 to 30 years after a victim turns 18. Last month, the French Senate rejected a proposed amendment to set the minimum age for consent at 15; lawmakers will consider a similar bill later this month.France is a pariah among most European nations when it comes to minors and consent.
The social movements of the 1960s, and in particular the protests of May 1968, propped up sweeping interpretations of sexual freedom that activists blame for France’s weak laws on sexual violence, especially against minors. The early 1970s saw the rise of a so-called pro-pedophilia lobby, marked by regular petitions in defense of childrens’ sexuality. In 1979, the left-leaning newspaper Libération published a petition in defense of a man on trial for having sex with girls as young as six, arguing that “The love of children is also the love of their bodies.” The signatories—Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre among them—were not fringe figures but stalwarts of the French left. Some, such as the intellectual Pascal Bruckner and former health minister Bernard Kouchner, remain highly visible in public life today.“There was an insistence that children had a sexuality,” said Piet. “And that’s the thinking that has informed our laws on rape.”Although the #MeToo movement has helped draw attention to sexual violence and bolstered activists’ calls for greater legal accountability, it has been slow to take hold in France. Accusers have faced defamation charges and been forced to pay hefty fines; powerful men in media and film have maintained influential jobs despite allegations of assault or harassment. “There’s always an idea that it’s the woman, or the young girl, who’s fabricating her aggressor,” said Salmona. That was the reasoning that ultimately beset the 2018 law. Initially, the government announced that the minimum age for consent would be set at 15, but what feminist activists at first celebrated as a victory fell apart months later. “There was a sacralisation of the presumption of innocence,” Salmona said, even though on other subjects—terrorism, for example—the French judicial system is far less tethered to that principle. “They say the risk is that you’ll put an innocent man in jail. But the risk is also, when you let a rapist free, they’ll rape again,” she said. “If we’re giving men the presumption of innocence, then we’re also presuming that young girls are liars,” said Piet. “There’s already a power imbalance, and still they have to prove themselves.”For Julie, the consequences of the drawn-out legal battle have been devastating. A girl who had always been an excellent student, Julie dropped out of school once the abuse began. After numerous suicide attempts over the past decade, she threw herself from the fourth floor of a building in 2014. In 2019, after a court reduced the rape charges to ‘sexual infraction,’ Julie attempted suicide again, ending up hospitalized in a coma after ingesting prescription pills. Speaking to Médiapart this week, Julie called the trial a “profound trauma.” She left the courtroom “persuaded that, everything that happened, I wanted it, and that it was all my fault.”“It’s incredibly serious, for the court to tell a girl that, in fact, she was not raped, to tell her, in fact, you consented to everything that happened,” Leriche said. “A victim cannot heal with that message. Today she’s 25, and her life stopped when she was 13. That’s more than half her life that has been stolen.”Julie and her mother are bracing for the March 17 decision. But even if their appeal isn’t granted, they’re confident that the past decade of mobilizing—and heightened visibility around her case in the wake of the #MeToo movement—will help chip away at France’s retrograde legal norms. “I have women and young girls who write to me,” Leriche said, “to say, ‘Thanks to you, we’re willing to speak out, we’re no longer ashamed.’”The question of sex with minors—and the sexualization of children—has been a feature of the national conversation for decades.