Early Childhood and Intra- and Extrafamilial Sexual Violence

Discover the third session of the 2026–2027 seminar series "Crossed Perspectives on Early Childhood" – "Early Childhood and Intra- and Extrafamilial Sexual Violence (France, 1940-2003): Judicial Discourses, Sensibilities, and Children's Voices."

Children aged between 18 months and six years old appear in court archives and in the case files of assize courts. As victims of sexual violence, committed either within or outside the family, they constitute a distinct category of victims in their own right. Their extreme vulnerability, their still limited — or even non-existent — ability to put into words what they have experienced, as well as their relationship to the body, consent and adult authority, set them apart from older children and adolescents.

Writing the history of sexual violence against very young children also means confronting another dimension of horror: violence inflicted upon individuals whose understanding of the world is still developing, and who do not necessarily possess the cognitive or linguistic tools to name, resist or testify to what they have experienced.

The place of the non-verbal in written and normative archives therefore raises specific methodological challenges: how can the reality of an experience be grasped when language is lacking? How can we recover what may be suppressed, distorted or rendered invisible in the judicial transcription?

This paper will examine early childhood as a distinct category of victimhood within judicial archives. It will also explore the forms taken by sexual violence against very young children, as well as the historian’s position when confronted with archives that challenge the methods and categories of historical inquiry.

• Zélie Pemerle: historian, doctoral candidate (University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, CHCSC)
• Discussant: Nathalie Sage Pranchère: historian, research fellow at the CNRS (SPHERE Laboratory)