“Do not sleep”. This strong slogan intends to be broadcast in the form of a hashtag, starting this Monday, on social networks. In fact, this is the name of the awareness campaign against chemical submission launched by Caroline Darian. The 44-year-old woman, whose mother was drugged for ten years by her father without her knowledge and handed over to men, had already published a book to warn about this little-known phenomenon.
The victim did not suspect anything.
The court case is out of the ordinary. Caroline Darian’s father, then 68, was arrested in September 2020 in a supermarket in Carpentras (Vaucluse) after being caught filming under women’s skirts. The man will be set free, but with some deep expertise and, in particular, a search of his home, the case becomes much more sordid.
Some 20,000 pornographic photos and videos have been unearthed, including dozens of films showing his unconscious wife being raped by strangers. Her wife did not suspect anything before the investigators explained to her, little by little and with supporting photos, what she had experienced.
In total, the police in charge of the investigations traced the tracks of 49 men who followed the couple between 2013 and 2020. In early May, the Avignon prosecutor’s office requested a trial for these men suspected of having taken advantage of unconsciousness. of the anesthetized mother to abuse her. A trial could be held in March 2024.
Not just “GHB in a glass of alcohol in a bar”
Caroline Darian explains, in a video shared on social networks, that chemical submission is the act of “drugging a person without their knowledge to abuse them without their being able to react or, sometimes, not even being aware of it.” Contrary to popular belief, this often occurs in the family setting.
“Chemical subjugation, in people’s minds, is restricted to GHB in a glass of alcohol in a bar, and especially in the student population. Not at all! Chemical submission is much broader”, Caroline Darian stated to BFMTV.com in April 2022while his book And I stopped calling you daddy had just been published.
This scourge is still unknown to the general public, despite the fact that it is a major public health problem. Caroline Darian’s mother was significantly anesthetized with anxiolytics and sleeping pills, present in the family medicine cabinet, and with a “totally simple” process.
“It was in his glass of water at the table, at lunch or at night. He could also be on his plate, from the moment he crushed and mixed the drug ”.
unrecognized symptoms
Family members can then witness strange situations, which remain unexplained due to the lack of awareness of the general public and professionals in the face of this scourge.
“For ten years we, with my brothers, have been powerless witnesses,” explains Caroline Darian on BFMTV.
“We had our mother on the phone (…) she was making incoherent comments, we had the feeling that she was in an advanced state of intoxication when she did not drink a drop of alcohol. She didn’t remember any conversations we had. she had had the day before, or even the same morning,” she explains.
If the general public were aware of these “red flags” of chemical submission, nearby victims could be accompanied for toxicology tests, stresses Caroline Darian. This campaign will especially explain the symptoms so that they are better known.
Some fifty personalities such as Olivia Ruiz, Daphne Bürki or Roxana Maracineanu have committed to broadcasting the awareness campaign. “They are sensitive to this issue that affects women on the front line, but also children or the elderly,” explains Caroline Darian in the daily columns.
Educate and train doctors.
The lack of training in this scourge is also felt in the medical profession. “My mother had lost a lot of weight. She was losing a lot of hair, she was anemic. Her sleep pattern was completely disordered, she suffered from insomnia,” Caroline Darian explains to BFMTV.com. However, she had seen three neurologists, particularly for memory lapses, as well as general practitioners and her gynecologist.
“It went completely unnoticed because health professionals are not fully informed, or even trained, to detect this type of case,” he laments.
The campaign, therefore, also aims to raise awareness among doctors so that “when faced with unexplained symptoms, they are able to evoke this diagnosis, thus saving precious time for their patients”, says Dr. Ghada Hatem on the campaign website – Ganzer, founder of the Maison des Femmes 93.
“Before imagining that in a family, which is supposed to be the place of security, of benevolence (…) you are drugged, for a doctor it is conceptually difficult,” says the doctor on BFMTV. However, he asks that we “know that it exists” and that we be “capable of thinking about it.”
600 cases per year, a largely underestimated figure
The #Mendorspas movement is completely voluntary, its members specify. Its objective is “to try to prevent, protect and better optimize care for victims of chemical submission in the private sphere.”
The number of cases of chemical submission each year is very difficult to quantify in France. Officially, we are talking about 600 cases per year, but this figure is greatly underestimated. Some victims don’t realize it, others suffer from sedative-induced amnesia. It is also difficult for some to file a complaint, especially against family members.
Source: BFM TV
