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© Brian Curnel
Interesting, but shocking German documentary that delves into three cases of child abuse in France. Three victims, 'Deborah', 'Robbert' and 'Noemi' tell about their experiences of abuse, and how they were molested in a pedophile network.

Rumours about these pedophile networks are not uncommon. The Casa Pia case in Portugal, the Dutroux case in Belgium, the Franklin affair in the USA and the Zandvoort affair in the Netherlands to name but a few - in all these cases there have been allegations of cover-ups and involvement of people in high societal standing, and investigations seldom lead to a satisfactory result - the Portuguese Casa Pia scandal, where politicians and a national tv-show host were actually convicted, being the proverbial black swan.

Noemi, in this documentary, claims to have met Marc Dutroux, the Belgian pedophile who was convicted for kidnapping and killing several girls in the late 1990's, through her father. If this is true, it is explosive evidence of the case reaching beyond national borders, something that has always been suspected by researchers.

The two girls and the boy's stories are horrible beyond imagination - not only involving abuse, but also child-murders, infant sacrifices and instances of cannibalism. It's tempting to dismiss their stories as the product of imagination, given the trauma they have been through, but it should be stated that these testimonies are very similar to what the "X-witnesses" in the Dutroux affair claimed.

There is an excellent book: Les dossiers X: Ce que la Belgique ne devait pas savoir sur l'affaire Dutroux (the X-files: what Belgium wasn't allowed to know about the Dutroux affair) in which three investigative journalists research the story of Regina Louf, aka witness "X-1". She was the first to come forward with her story. Many believed her but then the press instigated a character assassination. The writers of this book however, not only find many credible details in her story, about never resolved murders of young girls in Belgium, but they also show beyond a doubt the whole investigation into the case was deliberately derailed by Belgian Justice.