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25-05-2023
BRUSSELS: Mie Kohiyama was only five years old when she was raped by her 39-year-old cousin in France.
“He sexually abused me several times in just one day but I didn’t end up telling my parents or anyone else about what happened for many years,” Kohiyama, 51, who is now the co-chair of Europe’s branch of the Brave Movement, a global campaign to end childhood sexual violence, told media.
“Immediately after the incident, I completely forgot everything. My memory was repressed, which is common due to the trauma of child sex abuse,” she said.
Her trauma was portrayed in her artwork as a five-year-old.
“A few months after being sexually abused, I drew a picture of a child with no mouth and a snake sort of going through this child. I also drew a man with a moustache near the child and penned the words ‘O Scour’ seeking to actually write ‘Au Secours’ which means ‘Help me’ in French,” she added.
At the age of 37, Kohiyama suddenly regained her memory of what had happened to her as a child and she decided to share her story with her family and friends and fight for justice.
She became one of France’s first survivors of child sex abuse to file a case against her perpetrator at the court. But in December 2013, her case was closed due to France’s statute of limitations, a civil law which specifies the maximum time period for legal proceedings to take place after an incident has occurred.
The court ruled that she was raped in 1977 and brought the facts to the court only in 2011 which is longer than 30 years, making it impossible to carry on legal proceedings since the maximum time period had expired but since then, Kohiyama continued her fight for child rights and became a voice for victims and survivors of child sex abuse.
She is now pushing the European Union to implement a law that will tackle child sex abuse effectively both online and offline.
“When I was abused in the 1970s, the internet didn’t exist. Later, in the 90s, I learned that my cousin was crazy about the internet and spent days on it,” she said.
“Behind images online, there are real crimes. The only difference is that today victims of crimes like child sexual abuse suffer from double trauma,” she said, highlighting how after the abuse, their images are shared and then re-shared online. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
