A phone call at 4 am rarely brings good news, especially when it comes from a police chief. On the night of September 23, 2023, Jérôme Pasco, the mayor of the small Normandy town Conches-en-Ouche, picked up the phone. The situation was summed up briefly, but the elected official could tell from the tone that the caller was in shock. That evening, paramedics had been called to help a three-year-old girl in cardiac arrest. Pasco didn't learn the details of the "horrific situation" until early morning. "The paramedics who intervened were stunned. They've seen horrible things, but this was beyond comprehension. The body was so marked, so brutally damaged. The paramedics were looking at hell." There was little doubt that infanticide was the cause.
Five months after the murder, not a week goes by when Pasco doesn't think of little Lisa. It's the kind of story that will mark the mayor of this small town of 5,000 inhabitants "for life." Could this crime have been avoided? "Of course there were signs. But they weren't heeded," said the mayor. The early stages of the investigation revealed the isolation of the stepfather and mother, aged 29 and 27 respectively. They have both been charged with "murder of a minor" after confessing to repeated violence against the little girl. It also highlighted alcohol and drug abuse problems, against a backdrop of poverty. For the mayor, it was impossible not to acknowledge a "collective responsibility" for the child's death.
How many minors has French society let die in this way? It is impossible to say, as there are no official figures for infanticide in France. Various observers state that one child is killed every five days within the family setting. This is likely to be an underestimated figure.
To understand such societal dysfunction, Le Monde retraced three stories of infanticide: Lisa (3), Louka (5) and Mathéïs (3 months). These three unique narratives all had escalating warning signs. All highlight, at different levels, the system's failures to protect these children. Unlike femicides, infanticides are still seen as mere unpolitical news stories, where society's responsibility is rarely questioned. "All too often, while we wonder how it came to this, analysis of the cases reveals systemic dysfunctions with tragic consequences," noted the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights on December 13, 2023, regarding violent deaths of children in the family context.
As far as Lisa was concerned, no one raised the alarm to the impending danger. The family was off the radar in Conches-en-Ouche. Since 2020, they had been living in social housing in the upper part of town. The biological father had left and the mother had been living with a new partner for a year, unbeknownst to the social housing provider. According to the initial findings of the investigation, the violence against Lisa is believed to have been going on since at least early 2023. Her brother, six-year-old Hugo, who has been taken into care since the incident, was also a victim of abuse. However, the couple, who were unemployed, remained unknown to social services and to the municipality. "This case's challenge lies in understanding how nobody noticed anything for all that time. Or why no one said anything," said the prosecutor Rémi Coutin.
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