Why the appointment of Serge Hefez as head of the commission on parenting raises questions

In an interview given this weekend to Sunday at the Tribunethe Minister of Solidarity and Family, Aurore Bergé, announced the creation of a commission that will deal with “concrete proposals” For “Meeting the Challenges of Parenting.” This “scientific commission”which should begin work on Monday, is co-chaired by the child psychiatrist Serge Hefez. An incomprehensible choice for child protection activists.

Defender of the “parental alienation syndrome”

When the nomination was announced, a video interview with Serge Hefez resurfaced. Dated 2009, we see the child psychiatrist become the spokesperson for a dangerous theory, with no real scientific basis: “parental alienation syndrome”. Still used today in incest cases to discredit the words of the victims and their protective adult, the SAP is built on the image of a mother who would manipulate her child to harm the father in a context of parental conflict.

Theorized in the 1980s by the American psychiatrist Richard Alan Gardner, at a time when we were witnessing the emergence of the words of women who were victims of domestic and childhood violence, the SAP goes hand in hand with the erroneous idea that in the context of separation , there would be many more accusations that turn out to be false.

Since then, numerous studies have proven this separation is a favorable context for reporting violence, and that, in general, false accusations of sexual violence are marginal: for example, in 2005, research demonstrated that in the case of sexual violence committed against children, there are only 4% false accusations. SAP therefore fuels social denial of sexual violence against minors.

In 2019, the Ministry of Justice also issued an internal note to inform of its nature “controversial and unacknowledged” of this notion and in 2020 it was officially removed from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), the American reference register for mental disorders.

How to explain this appointment, which is not in line with the recommendations of the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence against Children (CIIVISE), which warns against this very pseudo-theory? This is the question that many child welfare stakeholders asked themselves on Twitter, referring in passing to Minister Aurore Bergé. Especially because this commission on parenting is part of a larger government effort to achieve this goal “restore parental rights”another lever of coercion in cases of incest, as the co-president of CIIVISE, Édouard Durand, explained to Madmoizelle in an investigation published last November: the maintenance of parental co-authority ” places the aggressor and the victim on the same level, rejecting the reality or hypothesis of violence. And therefore because it prevents the victim parent from being a subject of law and because it authorizes the aggressor parent to perpetuate the influence”.

While the future of CIIVISE remains to be clarified, these new announcements therefore call into question the government’s strategy for protecting child victims of domestic violence.