“My mother didn’t want me to bring a woman back to the farm”: an alleged rapist tried at the Ariège assizes

This Thursday, during the first morning of the trial at the assizes of Richard* for acts of rape of his minor nephew, the court and its six jurors drawn by lot set out, with the help of experts, to unravel the life and the personality of the accused, seeking a possible explanation for his act, which he confessed to at his first hearing in 2018. To better understand the facts dated from January 1985 to January 1987, the experts first established the family context in which Richard grew up, from a family of nine children of which he was the last boy.

After the loss of his father in 1974, a farmer with a “massive physique” and “iron discipline”, Richard took over the family farm near Saverdun at the age of 15, where his “pious” mother lived. “Until he was 41, he devoted himself body and soul to organizing his life as a farmer,” explained the personality investigator. He describes first emotions “doomed to failure”, a “difficult learning of his intimate life” and an emotional and sexual desert.

On his 40-hectare farm, the now 65-year-old man describes a heavy closed-door environment where sexuality was taboo. “My mother didn't really agree with me finding a wife, she didn't want me to bring a woman back to the farm,” the accused explained on the stand, arms alongside his body and clenched fingers. stress.

“He was in the renewal of the ordinary”

A family context which could explain the act according to the psychology expert who met the accused in April 2019. “Sex was forbidden. We weren't even allowed to think about it […] We can think that the confinement created the conditions for the act,” he analyzed. The latter also insisted on the severity of the father figure and his physical violence. “He was in the renewal of the ordinary”, estimated the expert, explaining that the accused would have reproduced the authoritarian pattern where the child has no say, “he must suffer the impulse, the paternal violence”.

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“He said that we were going to play a game and that we should definitely not say it”: an alleged rapist tried at the Ariège assizes

A hypothesis raised even if the accused assures not to have suffered sexual violence in his childhood. The psychiatric expert spoke of “opportunistic sexual acts”, not detecting an attraction to children, but facts comparable, due to the authority exercised over his nephews, to “para-incestuous acts”. “I am not sure that incest was intellectualized in the family,” the psychologist also estimated. “Family loyalty took precedence.” A context that the defense insisted on, emphasizing the turning point that the meeting with his wife, his wife since 2019, constituted for Richard.