The young intern who presents the evening explains to the microphone: "In consultation, we are led to ask strange questions:" When are your last stool? Do you have erectile dysfunction ? "; but throughout my medical studies, I was never taught to ask, "Did you suffer any violence?" "Tonight, braving the snow in the empty alleys of the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, some fifty future psychiatrists, like this young intern, came to listen to their sister Muriel Salmona, who specializes in psycho-traumatology and victimology , to explain to them why victims of violence "often fall through the cracks. We, doctors, can be missed, and it's the same for police and justice. "

Dr. Salmona has been running a lot lately. We see it everywhere. It provides training for future judges. She testifies as an expert, as in the trial of Pontoise - where, in front of the general indignation, it is then still expected that the aggressor of Sarah, 11, is tried for "sexual abuse" and not rape. She also goes on BFMTV to talk about the murder of Alexia Daval.

At 62, she is the psychiatrist we call as soon as there are victims.

And the opportunities are not lacking. She recognizes that, Muriel Salmona is currently experiencing "an acceleration of a movement that started with Laurence Rossignol (1), where it has moved a lot for the rights of victims."

His favorite subject: traumatic memory

Each time, tirelessly, of her inhabited flow, which sometimes makes her miss a word, she explains the psycho-traumatic disorders caused by the violence , which would cover 70% of psychiatric disorders. Like traumatic dissociation: "Being in a total survival mechanism put in place by the brain, which anesthetizes the victims, so that they can seem disconnected, detached, completely" in the west "", and the traumatic amnesia that can result: "A disjunction of the memory circuit", which makes memories of a traumatic event reappear until decades later, "most often brutally and uncontrollably," like an atomic bomb "".

Discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, traumatic amnesia was first described in traumatized soldiers who no longer remembered the fighting, before making their way to the DSM-III - manual classification of mental disorders published in 1980 - among the post-traumatic stress syndromes. At the time when the young intern began to practice psychiatry at the hospital, in the 1970s, she discovered that no one really cared about the link between patients' symptoms and their history of violence: "Psychotraumas were still essentially related to the war. There was absolutely no concern about violence in childhood. Most psychiatric disorders are related to violence. Then, as and when, the psycho-trauma of rape was taken into account.

Militant anti "rape culture"

To explain her vocation, Muriel Salmona talks about the discovery, at age 13, of the Shoah, her experience as a girl and a father who died early, who had been abused during childhood, which she says in an interesting formula: " For me, it was obvious that he was dead from what he had lived. At the source of her indignation, she also speaks of "being a girl, to realize how unfair one could be. "

And then I did medicine, it was not easy to be taken seriously.

She eventually left the hospital, which she did not support "power relations". At the birth of her third child, she stops a few years, then settles in liberal. In 2009, she founded Traumatic Memory and Victimology (2), "a way to be able to act better", whose husband, cardiologist, is the treasurer. Better act, that is, "put in place something that is really protective. The association publishes both petitions and studies - and if asked why they do not appear in scientific journals, it opposes their influence: the study was done with Unicef. The World Health Organization and the Hubertine-Auclert Center made a presentation. And it was published in the journal Medicine (but "his signature appears last," notes a researcher, which would mean that it has contributed the least. ").

Clearly, Muriel Salmona speaks like an activist. "At the end of the five-year period of François Hollande, it has changed a lot for the rights of victims. We were a little scared with the arrival of the new government, but we heard about fundamental demands. A perfect illustration of the "politics of trauma", described by Didier Fassin, anthropologist, and Richard Rechtman, psychiatrist, in "The empire of trauma: investigation of the condition of victim" (3). Never short of statistics and scandalizing stories, she has contagious indignation. A few days after the Pontoise trial, where a 28-year-old man was at risk of up to five years for sex with an 11-year-old, she says, "Just before, a guy was in court for transporting a kilogram of cannabis. He took four years in prison. There are some odd things! Comparisons that stigmatize the representatives of justice, and that she sees as symptomatic of a "culture of rape" at work in the institution.

She who has access to the government ("We have never heard so much in Parliament, we must admit it") is nevertheless convinced that justice is patriarchal. It targets both the legislative arsenal, which it considers incomplete, the application of laws, and the training of experts and magistrates.

Against impunity for sexual crimes

On October 20, 2017, she presented Marlène Schiappa, Secretary of State for Equality between Women and Men, the Manifesto against Impunity for Sexual Crimes, requesting the inclusion in the law of traumatic dissociation . "One study shows that 70% of rape complaints are dismissed , a good deal of which is because prosecutors believe there are no consequences for the victim," she says. The manifesto advocates raising the age limit of consent to 15 years (the High Council for equality between women and men recommends 13 years) and 18 years in the case of incest, vulnerability and adults with authority - and that the presumption is irrebuttable.

Muriel Salmona is also in favor of the total imprescriptibility of sexual crimes against minors - a provision reserved in France for crimes against humanity. In March 2017, the limitation periods for offenses and crimes were doubled. But that for sex crimes on minors has not been changed. The reporter of the law, Alain Tourret, then explained to Le Monde: "At a time when the need to punish is very important, we had to stick to the principles. To make a victim believe that she can only mourn when she seizes justice is a profound mistake. Muriel Salmona is indignant when she is told these words: "This manifests a total misunderstanding of what the victims want. We do not recover through justice, we do not ask him to be therapeutic, we ask him to do his job. The aggressors, when they are not punished, often make a lot of victims. "

According to a study conducted in March 2015 by Traumatic Memory and Victimology, 37% of minor rape victims at the time of the incident report having suffered traumatic amnesia . The reluctance to make them imprescriptible is based on one main argument: the increasing difficulty, over time, of proving the facts, and therefore the potential disappointed hopes of the plaintiffs. "The victims are not stupid, they can understand that it's hard to prove. And sometimes the longer we wait, the more evidence we have, simply because there are other victims. Just because it's going to be difficult does not mean that we should not make justice work! This is their problem. "

A fight and detractors

The word of Muriel Salmona is not without controversy. It has its detractors, the essayist Peggy Sastre (4) is one of them: "We are in a rather French drama that confuses scientific debates and opinion debates, with, on the one hand, those who shout louder and have the time and energy to be heard, and, on the other, researchers who do not have time to go around the media. And there is a bias that makes us confuse what we like and what is true. It remains to be seen what would be "pleasant" in the idea of ​​traumatic amnesia.

Olivier Dodier, a researcher in social and cognitive psychology, has written an article for a scientific journal (currently being validated) where he questions Muriel Salmona's latest study, based on the declarative. "This is not to say that the victims are saying anything, of course. But traumatic amnesia is debated within the scientific community. The idea that when you have experienced something unbearable is buried to live better has never been proven. It is very complicated to prove for ethical reasons ", since one can not inflict an injury in order to study its effects. "The problem of traumatic amnesia is that it is accompanied by other pathologies - depression , anxiety disorders, personality disorders - what is called comorbidity," the researcher continues. If anyone has any of these symptoms, a convinced shrink of traumatic amnesia might hypothesize that, perhaps as a child, he has experienced sexual violence. The patient may sometimes wrongly remember it, even if it is not necessarily voluntary on the part of the therapist. "

In the 90s, in the United States, the vogue of "recovered memory" therapies had caused judicial damage, before falling back following the retractions of complainants who said they had experienced rape, incest or satanic rituals. In 1997, the Royal College of Psychiatrists banned British psychiatrists from encouraging their patients to remember sexual abuse in childhood.

Respected rather than questioned

The "false memories induced"? A "theory built from scratch by pedophile parents," according to activist Mie Kohiyama, patient of Dr. Salmona and herself victim of post-traumatic amnesia after rape suffered at the age of 5 years. They have however been reported as a "growing phenomenon" in an interdepartmental report (2007) on sectarian excesses. The subject is undermined, since in its heart there is the word of the victims, whose urgency would want it to be heard and respected rather than questioned. For Muriel Salmona, moreover, the false memories belong to "theories of aggressors". "It's totally instrumentalized to blame victims who have reminiscences. But the vast majority of memories come back out of any therapy simply because very few people are cared for. "

And the criticism of an omnipotence of the word of the victims is to be relativized. "We never take the souvenir for cash, we work," she explains. We know that a child can restore something that he does not invent but that he has been told. That a person who is tortured may feel that they have experienced the torture of the person next to them and that they do not know where the physical damage from their own body is coming from. "

In contrast to a memory that would work "like a camera," Muriel Salmona interprets confused and fragmented memories as the very sign of dissociation. At the Primo-Levi Center, she receives in consultation victims of torture who "present the same elements. The more they have been subjected to extreme torture, the more serious they will be with psychotraumatic disorders, and the more they will be dissociated, the less it will be taken into account. And their asylum applications will be rejected.

Thus, this recent refusal by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, on the grounds that a man, his leg covered with iron marks, machete lacerations, a 20cm scar on the skull "does not describe enough the cell in which he was tortured. " "That words are called into question on elements which, for us, are rather proofs, is revolting. His goal, again: that people do not die anymore of what they have lived. -

1. Minister in charge of Women's Rights between February 2016 and May 2017. 2. memoiretraumatique.org. 3. Ed. Flammarion. 4. Author of Male Domination Does Not Exist, ed. Anne Carrière.