I’m afraid that all the men who gravitate towards my daughter are pedophiles

Article published July 6, 2021

Ever since I was old enough to understand what a danger is, and even earlier if I remember correctly, my mother has always gone out of her way to realize the threats that surround me. Maybe she did it too vehemently, maybe she went too strong, maybe she wanted to do everything to protect me as much as possible … she is the source of this fear. I don’t blame her, I understand her.

I was born in the late 1980s and have very clear and very traumatic memories of some events that may have happened on a national scale when I was still a child.

My mother and her fears, a strange legacy

For example, when little Marion Wagon was kidnapped in 1996 without ever being found, I remember what it did in my mother, who was already always on guard against my safety.

The discussions that followed, the reminders about never getting into a car I didn’t know, about not being touched by an adult, about never having a secret from an adult without my mother knowing … I remember as if it were yesterday.

Even though the 90s might have seemed softer and less violent than the following decades, at least under my childhood prism, pedophile was everywhere and my mother knew it very well.

However, I have the impression that there was less talk of dramas, more unspeakable secrets were hidden, the word was not released as it is today, but it was still there. When a little girl was kidnapped on her way to school, she made headlines. When Marion Wagon disappeared, her face could be seen everywhere, from milk cartons to shop signs.

For my part, these disappearances and my mother’s speeches have triggered something in me, an anguish that I am still unable to allay even today, much less since I became a mother too.

I am afraid of men and this has protected me

I have long been afraid of men. My mother taught me to be wary, and she was right, because she saved me at least twice.

The first was when a friend of my father’s, passing through our holiday home, asked me to kiss him on the mouth while we were alone for a short time in an upstairs room. I was maybe seven or eight and I quickly realized he didn’t have the right to ask me. I ran, my heart trying to get out of my chest, to see my mother downstairs, completely mad.

I didn’t have the courage to tell her what had just happened and she never knew (since obviously he didn’t say anything either, you can imagine), but in that moment I understood what she had wanted to tell me all this time: men they can be dangerous.

The second time I was coming home from college: I was in sixth grade. A car stopped near me and a man in his fifties asked me to get in. I have never run this fast in my entire life. Once again, thanks to my mother’s speeches of prevention, I was able to immediately understand the danger and escape before something serious happened.

The older I got, the more I confronted different types of men: the street stalkers, the old perverts, the junkies, the cowards, the freaks. But the older I got, the less I was interested in certain types, pedocriminals, getting too old for them. Much better.

The older I got, the more I forgot. I told myself that my mother had perhaps exaggerated a little by protecting me too much, that she had above all contributed to making me a great monster, and that she had been a little mistreated by him. Unfortunately there was no longer to explain to me that she was absolutely right to have acted in this way, as she died suddenly when I was only 13 years old.

I thought I got rid of that fear when I was in my early twenties and then got pregnant with a baby girl. Suddenly it all fell apart on me.

I pass on my fears to my daughter, to protect her

I told you a little about this anger that came out of nowhere, when a few months ago I was sexually harassed in the company of my four-year-old daughter. I told you as I understood that she unfortunately she was in just as much danger as all other girls, whatever their age, and that I should have explained to her that sometimes some men were bad.

In fact, I especially realized that since she was a child, I was already constantly on guard, on the verge of paranoia. At the time, when I was walking with her in a stroller and she was very small, I wanted to jump in the face of men who dared to look at her smiling. While she is, they only smiled because she was a cute little girl with her blonde braids, because she was funny with her stammering, not because they wanted to rape her.

But I also remember a time when, he must have been about a year old, we were sitting on the grass in a park. In the distance, a man on a bench was just staring at her. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, officially, but the look he had on her, and only on her, made my blood run cold. I was on high alert, so I preferred to leave and leave this stranger’s gaze.

Yes, it’s a fact: I don’t give any benefit of the doubt when it comes to my daughter.

Today I keep my vigilance. When my daughter was four, I told her, for example, that she didn’t have to let male facilitators at school help her dry herself when she was in the bathroom, or that she didn’t have to ask them for help pulling her up panties or pantyhose. If she was going to ask for help, she was going to have to ask a woman.

I explained to her that if one day she got lost, if one day she left my hand in a station room for example, and we separated, she shouldn’t ask for help from a man, but from a woman, and that she was still better if the latter had, if possible, an SNCF uniform.

How come ? Because I don’t trust, and I don’t give the slightest chance to men I don’t know, who could gravitate to my daughter and hurt her that’s impossible for me to imagine.

It’s hard to tell him this kind of thing. It’s a complex feeling, as in everyday life I want men to be as involved as women in early childhood professions. But despite my feminist beliefs and even though I know that this request made to my daughter is not fair to all men who are not criminal pedophiles, I cannot control my fear.

This increased vigilance also affects the men I know, those of our family. We know that attacks by relatives are more frequent than those committed by strangers and, apart from the father, I don’t trust anyone.

I don’t show it, of course, it’s complicated. But I always make sure my daughter doesn’t end up being looked after by just one man and that there are many other people there. When she was younger, only my husband’s mother or sister could change her.

As a matter of fact: I am always afraid. I’m afraid they’ll hurt her, I’m afraid they’ll kidnap her, I’m afraid of a Nordahl Lelandais or a Fourniret, I’m afraid of her for her, all the time.

And the only way I have found so far to control this fear is to do exactly the same thing that my mother did with me: prepare it, with the utmost delicacy, but also with impact, as much as possible, to the world around him, and its dangers.

Later, when she is older, I can also teach her to defend herself, to know the gestures and reflexes that save.

I don’t know if it will be enough, I don’t know if it will be able to avoid the tragedies, but I am crossing my fingers very hard that it will. Even if this unfortunately means traumatizing her as much as I could have been from my mother’s words. If that’s what it takes to protect her, I take full responsibility.

If you find yourself in the same situation as this testimony and you have uncontrollable anxieties about your fear of pedophile crime, it can be important to understand where it comes from so as not to transmit it too raw, thanks to the help of a therapist.