Case Lyhanna: the child's word
When Gayatri Spivak published her seminal text Can the subordinates speak? (recently translated into Catalan by Mariona Lladonosa, for Manifest Llibres, and into Spanish by Manuel Asensi, for Macba editions), her intention was to denounce that the word of the people that this decolonial theorist called subalterns was not escorted. Therefore, the question was ironic: of course the subordinates can speak (the French translation feminizes them), but their word is inaudible to the privileged.
In France, news that can be classified within the section Events has caused an earthquake. It is the Lyhanna case, for the name of the eleven-year-old girl who was raped and murdered at the end of May. Up to this point, it is a sadly common piece of news, as in the neighboring country (in ours, the figures are probably more or less equivalent) it is estimated that a child is sexually assaulted every three minutes. This case is especially painful because everything points to the crime having been committed by the father of the girl's best friend, that is, someone close to the family, who lived in a town of only six thousand inhabitants. But the popular outrage stems from the fact that the alleged culprit had already been reported, nine months ago, for repeatedly raping a ten-year-old girl in the municipality where he previously lived. In fact, this man had a string of complaints (some time ago, for raping a seventeen-year-old girl, but the judge finally considered the relationship to have been consensual), for looking at child pornography on the internet, for having harassed a teenager at the school where he worked as a monitor...
The good people are outraged because all these warning signs did not serve to neutralize the danger that this person represented and, especially, because the police did not arrest him preventively following this complaint of continuous rapes of a child. The highest political representatives (the Minister of Justice, the President of the Republic himself...) have accused the prosecution, the magistracy and the gendarmerie of negligence, who have defended themselves by saying that the slowness is due to a lack of resources, and thus they pass the buck, which only increases popular indignation. This feeling has led thousands of people –especially women, who are the majority in the protests– to demonstrate in different French cities and towns, once a week, since then, which shows that we are not only facing a morbid true crime that the public quickly forgets to move on to the next one.
This murder comes at a time when Ciivise (an independent commission that the government created in 2021 after the impact of Camille Kouchner's book La familia grande, a terrible account of incest committed against her twin brother when they were teenagers) was about to deliver a report on the measures that this same commission had recommended two and a half years ago to the government to fight against incest and sexual violence against children. The balance sheet is disappointing: more than half of the recommended measures have not been implemented, due to lack of resources and, above all, disinterest.
The Lyhanna case is thus becoming what the La Manada case represented in Spain ten years ago, but in relation to childhood. Some journalists have spoken of #MeToo-children, after #MeToo-incest, which did not manage to cross French borders. But the difference is notable, because if childhood is characterized by anything, it is, as etymology indicates, because it "does not speak": infans, in Latin, is the creature too young to be able to use verbal language.
However, in the case at hand, we can make the same reflection as Gayatri Spivak: it is not that children do not speak, it is that their word is inaudible. An education expert recently pointed out in Le Monde that two opposing views on childhood coexist in today's society: on the one hand, the one that recognizes the capacity for reflection and decision-making of children, especially in cases of conflict, and on the other, the one that believes that the vulnerability of children is so great that they must be protected, even from themselves. In abuse cases, the evidence is often limited to the victim's account and their credibility over what the alleged perpetrator says in their defense. But a child's word manifests itself in different ways than an adult's, and it must not only be heard but also understood and interpreted. This, combined with the fact that, as is often said, a false accusation can ruin the life of the adult it is directed at, means that in France seventy percent of accusations of sexual assault against children do not go to trial, and only one percent end in conviction. Must we conclude, then, that the child, like the subordinate, "cannot speak"?