Ten men charged in France for raping a 5-year-old boy using chemical submission
The boy's father allegedly handed his son over to the attackers and was also sexually assaulted that same night.
Ten men between the ages of 29 and 50 have been charged in northern France with the rape of a 5-year-old boy under chemical submission and with the consent of his father. This was reported Tuesday by the prosecutor's office in Lille, a French city bordering Belgium. In a statement, the prosecutor's office specified that the boy was "introduced to adult men by his own father" and suffered "sexual violence aggravated by the use of chemical substances." The events under investigation span a period between November 2024 and February 14, 2025. The charges also include "rape and sexual assault with torture or an act of barbarity," and "the administration, without the knowledge or consent of a minor, of his or her minor child or control of his or her actions for the purpose of committing rape or sexual assault." The judicial investigation began on February 15, 2025, following a report indicating that a party had been held the previous night in the town of Lille. According to the city prosecutor, Samuel Finielz, the investigation also revealed that the boy's father "was also a victim of rape and sexual assault committed with a chemical substance that same night." Life imprisonment
The maximum penalty for the crime of rape with torture or acts of barbarity is life imprisonment, according to the Lille Public Prosecutor's Office, which stated in a press release that the child is receiving specialized care and is in the custody of his mother. At the time the father subjected his son to the abuse, the father was already separated from the child's mother. Nine of those under investigation have been remanded in custody in recent months. During that time, one of the main defendants in the case took his own life. Specifically, it was last June, while he was already in pretrial detention. The recent Pelicot case
This case is reminiscent of that of Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman who was raped by about fifty men while she was unconsciousDrugged by her husband. The Pelicot scandal shook France, both because of the brutality of the events and, above all, because of the gender component in the sexual assaults. During the trial, Pelicot emphasized this aspect, describing current society as "sexist and patriarchal," in which "rape is trivialized." "I was raped, it's not a sex scene," she declared before the court. Her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, who drugged her to render her unconscious and handed her over to other men to assault her, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence he faced. The court also convicted about fifty men who participated in the rapes.