Abuse of minors: breaking the silence is not enough

The Twaha Academy affair has reignited a debate that society preferred to silence. Behind the legal procedures and official press releases, therapist, teacher and lawyer question the essential: how to support and protect the child victim.

There are silences that last for years. Children who come home from school without saying anything, parents who don't ask the right questions, adults who prefer not to know. And then, sometimes, an affair breaks out. Names are circulating. Social networks are going crazy. And Mauritian society, once again, finds itself facing what it had chosen not to look at.

The affair of Twaha Academy, a Bel-Air establishment targeted by recent allegations of abuse of minors, produced this brutal revealing effect. Beyond the ongoing investigation and the legal proceedings initiated, it raises a question that the official press releases do not address: once the floor has been released, what do we do? How does a family support a traumatized child? How does a teacher recognize the warning signs? And what does Mauritian law actually provide to protect victims?

Musarrat Seekdaur has been receiving guests in his office for five years. An EMDR therapist specializing in trauma, she supports adolescents and adults who have experienced sexual violence during childhood, taking into account, she says, “the cultural context and Mauritian social realities”. His observation is clinically sober: “Trauma does not disappear over time if it is not treated. »

The child's immediate reactions are often marked by confusion and incomprehension. Unable to fully grasp the gravity of what he experienced, he turns to adults to make sense of his own experience.

Fear sets in, anxiety, shame, increased tenfold when the abuse is accompanied by emotional or religious manipulation, as the Twaha Academy affair seems to indicate. An unjustified feeling of guilt can also become deeply rooted, although the child has no responsibility for what happened to him, explains the therapist.

The signs are rarely spectacular, but they are readable for those who know how to look for them: recurring enuresis, withdrawal, sleep problems, sudden and unexplained irritability. Regressive behaviors that those around them, due to lack of training or information, risk reading as a whim or an adolescent crisis. In reality, it is the mark that the traumatic experience leaves in the body and in the mind.

In the long term, the consequences can be much more severe: post-traumatic stress, hypervigilance, depression, collapse of self-esteem. Flashbacks can appear years later, triggered by an image seen on social media. This requires, in the period following a revelation, particular vigilance regarding the content to which