2023-09-27 12:19:00
In 2015, a mother (1948) and one of her sons (1977) were arrested for acts of abuse committed against two (a girl and a boy) of the family’s six other children. They suffered from serious psychiatric problems. One of them broke everything, the second ran away. To avoid placing them in an institution, they regularly locked them in two 9m² cells built in an annex to the isolated house in the countryside.
Last June, the Dinant criminal court finally looked into this matter. The mother, absent for health reasons, was prosecuted for deprivation of care, arbitrary detention and degrading treatment. His son was only concerned about arbitrary detention. “I recognize the materiality of the facts but we did not do it because they were disabled. If we locked them up, it was out of kindness and for their own good because when they had seizures, they were dangerous for themselves,” the latter explained to the court. “My father suffered from psychosis. My mother always knew how to help him without having to place him in an institution. When schizophrenia problems appeared in my brother and my sister, we wanted to do the same but the situation quickly became complicated, we no longer knew how to manage it and we were unable to call on outsiders.”
Distrust and religion
The Namur public prosecutor’s office highlighted the very specific context of the facts. The family lived on the fringes of the neighborhood and society and were followers of the Msg Lefèvre movement. “She attended a radical branch of Catholicism. They lived in the old way, like in the early 1900s. They were suspicious of classical medicine.”
The idea of placement in an institution had been raised by doctors but it appears from the file that adequate care, although prescribed, was not provided for philosophical or religious reasons. The mother of the family, who decided everything, was more of a fan of gentle and natural medicine.
It was following an anonymous tip that the facts came to light. When they responded to the scene, the police found the girl without clothes, in the fetal position under a table, on a burlap. “When I first saw her, she was a little savage. She did not speak, ate with her hands and could not stand clothes,” added the administrator of this girl’s property.
This Wednesday morning, the Dinant criminal court granted the two defendants a simple suspension of the sentence on the basis, in particular, of exceeding the reasonable time limit. The prevention of degrading treatment was also not taken into account by the mother.
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