A French court has jailed three young men for the gang rape of an 18-year-old in 2020, after the victim’s mother kept evidence in a plastic bag for a year, until her daughter was ready to file a complaint.
The mother’s actions helped lead to the conviction late Wednesday, in a country where only a fraction of women file a police report after a sexual assault, and most of these cases never make it to court.
Milly, who told her story to French daily Le Monde in 2024, was living in western France but visiting the Paris region in March 2020 when she said she was abandoned by friends in a room in the suburb of Champigny-sur-Marne.
The teenager told investigators that eight men -- most of them wearing balaclavas -- hit her, and several raped her while the others looked on laughing, before a blow to the neck knocked her unconscious.
The young woman told her mother of the attack but was not ready to speak to police, so the parent stored away her leggings and underwear in a plastic bag, to preserve possible DNA evidence on them.
“I took Milly’s clothes, which were covered in stains, put them in a plastic bag, and hid them in the hallway cupboard,” her mother Sandra told Le Monde, which withheld their family name.
She then took pictures of her daughter’s wounds and took her to the doctor’s the following day to get a medical report, the newspaper reported.
When Milly filed a complaint a year later, in April 2021, investigators were able to identify genetic traces of four people on the clothes.
After a closed-door hearing, a juvenile court in the Paris suburb of Creteil late Wednesday said it had sentenced two of the men, who were aged 15 at the time, to 10 years in jail.
Another was handed six years behind bars for complicity, while three others will be tried at a later date.
Only seven percent of women in France file a legal complaint after a sexual assault, attempted rape or rape, according to a government survey of victims.
Six out of 10 cases are then deemed not strong enough to go to court, a figure that rises to seven out of 10 cases when the victim is a minor, according to a government report in November.
mlf-ah/phz
