The youthful features of Milly's face belie her 4am wake-up call. She's still dressed in the blue, yellow and gray uniform of a line worker at the plywood sheet factory where she's just done a shift as part of a trial period. Her mother Sandra has been working there for six years. "Right now I like the factory, at least I'm not thinking too much, I'm just concentrating on what I'm doing," said 23-year-old Milly. "Yes, but I don't expect you to stay there all your life," chimed in Sandra, her hair damp from her post-work shower to clean the wood and glue particles out.

"I need money to take my driving test so I can become a care assistant," explained Milly, kneading at her thigh with her fingers, sitting in the kitchen of the family house in the Niort countryside, in western France. "I did start my driving test four years ago, but..." Her voice stalls, her eyes fill with tears. Her mother finishes her sentence: "With the event, with the facts..." Sandra searches for the right word. "With the assault, you couldn't go on." "My life is no longer the same, I wasn't like this before, they destroyed my life," Milly said, breaking down.

In the language of the courts, "the event, the facts, the assault" have been qualified as gang rape, complicity in gang rape, death threats and intimidation to prevent a victim from pressing charges. The events in question took place on the night of March 3, 2020, in the garbage room of an apartment block on the Mordacs housing estate in Champigny-sur-Marne, a suburb of Paris, and have led to the indictment of seven men and one woman. The first names of the minors and those who were not referred to the court have been changed.

Victims of gang rapes are dotted around the French criminal courts, but they rarely speak out, crushed by the cruelty of what they have endured. Although in France's crime statistics rape committed by several perpetrators is not the most common of occurrences, for Christelle Hamel, a sociologist at the French Institute for Demographic Studies, the explanation for its existence at all lies not in the economic, sexual or cultural deprivation of the aggressors, but "in the system of gender hierarchy" – as she wrote in a 2003 article.

'It's for them to be ashamed, not us'

Le Monde first asked Sandra to talk about her fight to keep her daughter alive, and about their life after her attack. Then Milly wanted to sit in on the interview. Then she started talking. At the end of two days of interviews, this mother and daughter made the rare decision to waive their anonymity: to use their real first names and to allow their photos to be published. "My daughter is not a piece of meat. No woman is a piece of meat. It's for them to be ashamed, not us," insisted Sandra. Milly added: "I'd like to set up an organization, something to help girls who are in hiding because they've been through the same thing as me and need help."

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