Posted on 03/03/2005 5:03:16 AM PST by Texian First
66 PEDOPHILES STAND TRIAL – BIGGEST CASE EVER IN FRANCE
In the French City of Angers an exceptional pedophile trial starts today. Exceptional due to the high number of defendants: 66 adults from a marginal area in Angers. They are accused of having molested 45 young children (often their own). But also exceptional because of the atrocities the victims suffered (a mother let rape her 10 year old son for a new tire); 39 different persons raped a girl the same age.
The youngest molested child was 6 months, the oldest 14 years. The boys and girls were videotaped during the rapes. Then the tapes were shown in the family circle. Among the 66 defendants are 27 women. Horrible, certainly if you know that a mother was filmed drinking coffee while men were raping her child. The DA says that not all the criminals are identified because some were masked. He suspects that there are even more victims than known so far. Some parents got 300 euro a week for lending out their child. Others got only a packet of cigarettes for it. Most of the defendants made confessions.
(Excerpt) Read more at hln.be ...
I was going to say, this sounds like another McMartin Preschool witch hunt.... but I guess not.
-ccm
You won't find much to cheer you up. This kind of thing was even more common in days gone by, I think.
-ccm
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that girls mature earlier than boys. There are a lot of good reasons for setting the age of consent at 18 in our culture, but that particular number is somewhat arbitrary.
A friend whose family came from Finland told me that not so long ago girls there married in their early teens and that a girl not married by 16 was considered an old maid.
Maybe we can get the ACLU to go over there and defend them at US taxpayers expense like they defended NAMBLA. Line 'em up and shoot 'em all and spare the circus.
ANGERS - France's biggest criminal trial in modern history opens with 66 men and women facing charges for the rape and sexual abuse of children as young as a few months old.Daily Telegraph, Australia
The case is being held in a specially constructed wooden hall in the law courts in Angers, western France, and is expected to take four months to be heard.
More than 60 lawyers will be involved, and the 430-page prosecution case will take four clerks three days to read out.
Also attending will be many of the 45 victims of the alleged ring, whose stories are so painful that jury members will have access to a special psychiatric team.
Details of the allegations against the 39 men and 27 women make appalling reading.
All come from the poorest and least educated sections of society, and lived in the Saint-Leonard quarter of Angers, a largely pleasant and leafy historic town.
Investigators were alerted to the network when they decided to keep tabs on Eric Joubert, a former convicted sex offender released in 1999 who was supposed to be undergoing a course of psychiatry.
He and another former offender, Franck Vergondy, are alleged to have founded the ring.
According to the prosecution, between 1999 and 2001 nearly 50 children were raped or abused – though the overall number could be much higher.
The prosecution has gathered evidence to show that parents bartered their own children for small sums of money, food parcels and cartons of cigarettes.
One girl of 10 was allegedly raped by more than 30 adults.
Most of the abuse took place in Mr Vergondy's apartment, prosecutors say, but also in sheds by garden allotments on the outside of Angers and in caravans.
Locals said they were aware of a constant traffic of "voiturettes" – cheap electric cars that need no licence – but no one ever made a comment.
For many in France, one of the shocking elements in the case is the number of women involved. Of the 39 accused who are in custody, 13 are women.
Three of the defendants face life in prison if they are convicted, and the others lesser terms ranging from three to 20 years.
Amid all the horror generated by the facts surrounding the trial is a note of caution created by a previous pedophile trial in northern France last year.
That case, called the Outreau trial, saw 13 people implicated of abusing children on the basis of one woman's evidence and some corroborating statements from alleged victims.
But the woman later admitted in court she had lied, and the children's testimony was found to be unreliable.
Nevertheless, many of the accused in that case languished in prison for four years, and one committed suicide, before the truth finally came out in court.
One of them named Roman Polanski?
In our attempts to explain this horrible tradgedy, we need to be sure not to confuse the facts of what has taken place here with what is considered socially acceptable.
1. Parents are supposed to PROTECT their children from harm, plain and simple!
2. There are absolutely NO gray areas here,this is not a matter of young children having conceptual relationships with older men, it is young children, some not even able to walk yet, being forced to have sex with their own parents!!
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