I Choose To Live

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She resisted her parents too, particularly her mother, who wanted badly to be confided in, to share her burden. "I just wasn't going to do it," she says. "There was no point. It had happened, it was over, end of story. Telling her about it would not have changed that, and it would only have made her feel 10 times worse."

Dutroux mounted a bid for release on the grounds that he had been held for too long without trial and in inhumane conditions. Psychologists describe him as a having a strong sense of his own victimhood. I wished them all the happiness I could. According to him, my parents were mean. I still loved them even so. I just wanted to go home." Jean-Marc Connerotte, who led the initial investigation, testified in court that the girls had kissed Dutroux as police freed them.This book, dignified and restrained, was written so that the victim’s voice can at last be heard. For too long the attention of the media was monopolized by her torturer, while his victim was ignored. Her testimony, free of any fascination with evil or perversity, show how utterly the lives of the victims of paedophiles are devastated, their futures destroyed – even if some, like Sabine, manage to survive and get on with their lives. It is our duty to listen. Upon hearing Sabine's descriptions of what Dutroux had subjected her to, the father of another of his victims, Pol Marchal, collapsed in the courtroom and had to be taken to hospital. The parole hearings

https://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/i-am-just-a-scapegoat-dutroux-tells-court-25910171.html She insisted on returning to the dungeon-like cellar in the Dutroux home in Marcinelle along with Sabine and court officials in April to help her "come to terms" with what had happened there.

Psychologists say this story touches on the darkest and most primal of all human fears, concerning as it does the drugging, sexual violation and killing of children concealed in dark cellars. On 28 May 1996, Sabine Dardenne was 12 years old: the age she is in the photograph she is photographed holding on the front cover of this book. On this day, Sabine was kidnapped by a notorious paedophile, a Belgian named Marc Dutroux. Sabine was taken from her bicycle as she was cycling to school, shoved into a van and then imprisoned in a small concrete cell where she was drugged, starved and raped until her rescue on 15 August 1996. It was in this period that Julie and Melissa died after Martin claimed she was too afraid to go to the dungeon to feed them as instructed. Dutroux buried their bodies in the garden of a house he owned in the village of Sars-la-Buissière. Look, I didn't ask for any of this," she protests, puffing hard on an umpteenth fag. "I'm not a star, a singer or an actor or something. OK, I'm quite proud of myself, I suppose, for standing up to what I stood up to. And I'm proud of myself for standing up to what I'm standing up to now. I've dealt with it all fairly well, I suppose. But I haven't actually done anything." Leafing through her book, recalling the horrors that were recounted during the trial, it is difficult to accept that that can be so. Are there really no nightmares, no cold sweats, no foul images flitting through the mind when they are least welcome? "Nope, none of that," she says cheerily. "My head's screwed on straight. There's no point taking pity on yourself, after all. You live with it, you move on."

The following day the brutally abused bodies of Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo were found in the garden at Sars-la-Buissière. Their rescue, shown on Belgian television, gave a ray of hope to the parents of the girls who had gone missing without a trace.

8 mars : témoignages de femmes

Sabine Dardenne, in any event, has always said she never saw anyone but Dutroux during her captivity, strengthening the case that he was a "lone predator."