Written by Maeva Dumas
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As the international day for the elimination of violence against women takes place this Monday, November 25, Jeanne, originally from the Pays de Caux, tells the story of her mother, that of a woman beaten by her husband for years.
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When Jeanne (first name anonymized) speaks about her mother, her words come together with difficulty. Originally from the Pays de Caux, the woman, now 55 years old, remembers everything.
Daughter of a woman mistreated by her husband, she recounts her childhood punctuated by brutality, loneliness and fear.
“The earliest memories I have with my mother are happy ones. She was beautiful, kind, dynamic.” Long afternoons spent by the sea, fishing trips, the joyful cacophony of siblings playing music, Jeanne's childhood seems to be closer to that of the other children.
“My mother loved nature, we often took walks in the forest“, she describes with nostalgia. Moments of joy which diminished over time, until disappearing when Jeanne became a teenager.
“Perhaps I was too young to see the other reality, the one where my mother was suffering. She was a strong person, I think she didn't want to show anything.”
On the family farm, nestled in the Caux region, life was far from harmonious. The daughter of a farmer father and a housewife mother, she dreaded returning home after school.
“I remember the beatings, the violence from my father towards my mother. She was cloistered, isolated. Around the age of 11, she fell into depression“, says Jeanne with a tight throat.
As a teenager, she feared her father, who was also brutal with his children, and had no one to confide his terrible daily life to.
I come from a very practicing Catholic family and my mother was refused permission to divorce my father. It was a cry for help, no one listened. Between the ages of 11 and 14, she ended up being bedridden continuously, she was cut off from everything.
Jeanne, daughter of an abused woman
In 1985, her mother died at the age of 39, Jeanne was 14. A trauma which marked the Cauchoise for life.
“When I went to see her at her bedside, she often repeated that she wanted to leave. I didn't understand what that meant, and then she died. Doctors said it was because of a pulmonary embolism. For me, she died because of the years of violence she suffered and the despair that consumed her. My mother went through hell, she only hoped for one thing, that it would stop” Jeanne delivers with a trembling voice.
After the loss of her mother, Jeanne's life was a long struggle to try to lead a normal existence. “I was sent to a Catholic institution and separated from my brother and sisters. I felt alone, abandoned. I quickly left school to start odd jobs, I was lost. You don't come out of a childhood like mine and the death of your mother unscathed..”
A life journey that the Norman woman approaches with difficulty, even with her son, now 15 years old. “I always kept to myself what I experienced when I was little, I wanted to preserve those close to me. Today I want to talk, I want to tell what my mother suffered“, she explains.
She materializes this wish by writing a book for “to do justice” to her mother and help children who have experienced the same life path as her.
Although it is currently being written, Jeanne recognizes that this book has become cathartic in facing her story. “Suffering that when you're a child breaks something in you, it's a sorrow that stays and sticks to your skin. I want to pay tribute to my mother, say out loud what the people around her at the time silenced. And I want people who also saw their mother being mistreated to no longer feel alone, I want to help them.”
A fight that she is determined to wage for her mother, but also for all women who are victims of domestic violence.
Tuesday November 19, 2024, the Interministerial Mission for the Protection of Women (Miprof) highlighted in its new report what more than 270,000 victims of violence committed by their partner or ex-partner were recorded by the police in 2023. Among them, 85% are women.
