Children ‘subjected to monstrosities': Report exposes decades of abuse in French schools

France 24

2 days ago

French lawmakers on Wednesday accused the state of "structural dysfunctions" in handling child abuse in schools, delivering a scathing 330-page report that chronicles decades of systemic violence and silence across France's educational institutions.
'Children across France were subjected to monstrosities,' wrote the committee president, Fatiha Keloua Hachi, describing the three-month investigation as a 'deep dive into the unthinkable'.
The probe, led by centrist Violette Spillebout from Macron's ruling party Renaissance, and Paul Vannier, a lawmaker with the hard-left France Unbowed party (LFI), heard testimony from 140 people, including survivors. While abuse occurred in both public and private schools, the MPs said Catholic institutions were especially affected, citing 'stricter educational models' and a persistent 'law of silence'.
In many cases, they said, it wasn't just the children who kept quiet but also school officials, clergy and civil servants who failed to act or actively covered up wrongdoing.
Historian Claude Lelièvre traced this back to the culture of silence and obedience in religious teaching orders. "They viewed obedience as a cardinal virtue, both for themselves and for their students. Obedience at all costs. Obedience to someone who, in their eyes, was the lieutenant of God on earth," he said.
Public schools, by contrast, embraced a different philosophy. "It wasn't about obeying a person," Lelièvre said, "but helping children consent to shared rules."
The Bétharram case
Much of the report focuses on the Bétharram Catholic boarding school in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques region, where priests, teachers and staff are accused of having sexually and physically abused students from 1957 to 2004. According to the MPs, some 200 complaints have been filed since the beginning of the year. Victims described acts of 'unprecedented severity, of absolute sadism'.
Lawmakers called Bétharram a "textbook example" of the state's failure to prevent and monitor abuse, warning that the same systemic flaws "are still in place today".
Prime Minister François Bayrou, who was education minister from 1993 to 1997 and sent some of his children to the school, has faced growing criticism. The report stops short of directly implicating him, but Spillebout and Vannier wrote: "In the absence of action from a minister who was informed and in a position to intervene, the abuse of students at Bétharram continued for years."
Bayrou's eldest daughter, Helene Perlant, accused the clergy running the school of systemic abuse, saying a priest beat her during summer camp when she was 14. She said however her father did not know about the incident.
In a footnote, Vannier accused Bayrou of having "knowingly misled" the National Assembly in March, when he initially claimed to have learned about the scandal "at the same time as everyone else, in the press". He later admitted he had received information, but said he had not grasped the seriousness of the allegations.
Lack of figures and oversight
Beyond Bétharram, the report highlights the state's failure to monitor abusive staff. Regional background checks allowed sanctioned teachers to move between schools undetected. "The Ministry of Education," the report said, "is still incapable of ensuring that a sanctioned teacher cannot simply be transferred to another school."
This kind of administrative evasion has been going on for decades. "For a long time now, there has been a culture of cover-up, of transferring problematic staff, of not reporting incidents when they occurred," Lelièvre said.
The committee also pointed to a lack of national data on abuse. 'No consolidated public data is available on violence committed against pupils by members of staff,' the report stated, urging the government to commission new surveys.
Where data does exist — notably on sexual violence — the gap between official data and victimisation surveys is stark. While national surveys estimate 7,000 pupils are affected annually, state school leaders reported only 280 incidents in 2023-2024.
'The Ministry is not really tracking these issues thoroughly,' Lelièvre said. "The figures are inconsistent, and there's a lack of proper monitoring and understanding of what's happening. We need much more robust oversight, including independent monitoring, not just relying on the institution itself."
Urgent recommendations
To address what they call a "systemic culture of impunity", the MPs called for tighter background checks and the creation of a national reporting platform that would allow whistleblowers to bypass traditional hierarchies. The new platform, called Signal Educ', would be accompanied by annual regional reports on abuse in schools.
They also recommended that contracts between the state and private schools include binding provisions on abuse prevention and child safety, with clear sanctions for non-compliance. For boarding schools, they called for yearly unannounced inspections and confidential interviews with randomly selected students.
Other proposals include the creation of a national compensation fund for victims and a legal review to potentially extend, or in some cases eliminate, statutes of limitation for sexual abuse of minors.
Although the cross-party commission unanimously adopted the report, it remains to be seen whether lawmakers will act on its recommendations.