I tried to get help. I told my teachers, and they called social services. But in the end? They did nothing. They just archived the file and told my mom they couldn’t do anything since she and he still lived together. So, I was stuck.

Then my mom got sick. She bled every day for a year. She looked awful, had no energy at all. It was terrifying. When she finally had surgery, I thought something might go wrong, that she might die. Luckily, she got better.

But this year? Everything fell apart. We lost our house, and it took forever to find another one. I seriously thought we’d end up on the street. When we finally had a place, my mom got sick again. The same thing as before. I was so scared. I remember crying at school because I didn’t know what was going to happen. The school social worker called my mom, and it really freaked her out.

Then, summer came, and things got even worse. They sent my mom a letter saying she had to take me to see a social worker. She recorded the whole thing. It was awful. The lady kept telling me not to speak English, then separated us. When it was my turn, I was terrified they’d take me away. And then she said, “Don’t worry, in the worst case, we’ll put you with him.”

Like, what? The man who abused me for years? I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even know what to think. It wasn’t funny. It was horrifying.

I didn’t tell my mom right away. When I finally did, everything changed. If that hadn’t happened, I don’t think we would have ever left. My mom wasn’t going to leave without my sibling, no matter how bad things got. She postponed our tickets twice, ready to do it again. But after that? She knew we had to go.

I can personally attest to a blatant and unequivocal deprivation of basic human rights as a foreigner on French soil who has been confronted by an insurmountable challenge which a French citizen is not similarly required to overcome; instead, the French legal system has a built-in obstacle or roadblock put in place to slowdown or detract from the foreigner’s unequivocal mountain of evidence of abuse/negligence silently suffered at the hands of the French abuser who had the benefit of the French system readily available to bury any such charges against him, as the French system shifts the impossible burden of proof on the weaker, more vulnerable foreign spouse who has far fewer resources and a non-existent network in France.