The Brussels public prosecutor’s office has confirmed several complaints of indecent behavior in the Bois de la Cambre in Brussels. Juliette* is one of the plaintiffs. She tells.
Juliette is a student and lives in Ixelles. Aged 22, the young woman was partying on September 27 when the worst happened.
It is 4 a.m. when Juliette leaves the “Jeux d’hiver” nightclub, located in the Bois de la Cambre. She contacts a taxi to come pick her up and take her home. But the drivers respond absent or cancel at the last minute. “We had already been waiting for 15 minutes and we had to wait another 15 minutes”she says. Juliette then decides to return on foot, alone, through the woods.
After a few minutes of walking, Juliette arrives near Avenue de Flore, blocked to traffic. Not a cat around. It is at this moment that the young woman feels hunted. “I heard the footsteps getting closer, it was so fast…” Juliette realizes, but it is too late. “I told myself but this couldn’t happen to me, not to me, not now.” And then… “This man took me from behind and really told me that in any case I couldn’t do anything because there was no one, he was right”she says. “I screamed but no one could hear me.”
“The survival instinct”
No longer possible for Juliette to stop the horror. She is blocked by the arms then grabbed by the throat. Then, while his brain tells him just the opposite, his body calms down. She leaves this man – who would have entered “30 and 40 years old” – do, absolutely against his will. “I have to do as he wants.”she remembers saying to herself. “It’s the survival instinct.”
Juliette then suffers a rape, the details of which she obviously avoids discussing. She is under duress with a knife and verbal threats. She has no choice. “It lasted ten minutes”she reports. “It’s pretty quick, but it seems long.” She evokes a certain “dissociation” with her body. ‘We detach ourselves from everything.’
The attack ends, and her tormentor releases her. “Once he finished, he said, ‘You can leave.’” Juliette directly contacts her friends, who are still in the nightclub, located a few hundred meters away. They come running.
Having a panic attack and crying, Juliette tells them what has just happened to her. She was scared, she remembers, but she was relieved to now be surrounded. The police then arrive and transport her to Saint-Pierre hospital in Brussels. She carries out examinations, then sets up a whole series of follow-ups, medico-legal and psychological, follow-ups which she has “need”.
A message
A fortnight after the events, Juliette is not afraid to tell her terrible story and wants it to resonate with all other women, so that they know that “it really happens”. For her, her story must be known. “If I had seen or heard that this was happening to someone I know, I would not have taken this wood”she concludes.
Juliette filed a complaint following this attack.
Miscellaneous rape in the woods of the arch
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