France must better regulate private Catholic schools, lawmakers say after abuse scandal

Straits Times

3 days ago

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FILE PHOTO: A view shows the school Le Beau Rameau, formerly known as the Notre-Dame de Betharram institution, a French Catholic college-high school, in Lestelle-Betharram, near Pau, France, February 21, 2025. REUTERS/Alexandre Dimou/File Photo
PARIS - France must better regulate private schools and allow prosecutions for abuse of pupils whenever it was committed, two lawmakers said in a report published on Wednesday after allegations of decades of abuse at a Catholic school.
The parliamentary investigation into French schools was triggered by dozens of complaints of physical and sexual abuse by staff and religious members from former pupils of Notre-Dame de Betharram, where many pupils lived on site during term.
"Aside from the women serving us food at the canteen, everyone was part of the violence," the report quotes Didier Vinson, a former pupil of Betharram, in the southwest of the country, as saying.
Other former pupils and ex-students from other schools also recounted similar experiences and accounts of physical violence and sexual abuse in the report.
Prime Minister François Bayrou's eldest daughter, who was a pupil in Betharram, in April described being violently hit by a now-deceased priest at the school in the 1980s.
In total, some 250 complaints have been filed against at least 26 alleged perpetrators, the report said. At least 90 of the complaints concern sexual abuse by at least 15 perpetrators.
Management at the school, which has been renamed Le Beau Rameau, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It is not known to have commented publicly on the allegations.
The allegations have taken on a political dimension, with Bayrou, a former education minister and a prominent politician in the region where the school is located, accused by opponents of lying when he said he did not know about the scandal.
His daughter, Helene Perlant, said she had not told her father until the week her allegations were published in Paris Match. Bayrou has repeatedly rejected any wrongdoing, saying he had not been aware of the abuse.
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The report's authors, Paul Vannier from the hard left France Unbowed and Violette Spillebout, from President Emmanuel Macron's centrist party, now plan to work on draft legislation that would scrap the statute of limitations for abuse against minors. Vannier said he also wants parliament to act against Bayrou, whom he accused of lying.
Many of the Betharram complaints concern alleged abuse committed as far back as the 1950s. The statute of limitations is currently 30 years for rape and 10 years for sexual assault.
"This report makes a damning observation, that of a major failure of the state in the control and prevention of violence in schools," Vannier told a news conference.
The lawmakers wrote in their report that the situation was worse in private, Catholic schools. They cited "an explicitly stricter educational model" and a "particularly pervasive code of silence".
There are about 2 million pupils in Catholic schools in France. French state-run schools are secular under France's constitutional separation of religion and state. Most of the country's private schools are Catholic.
The lawmakers want the state to create a compensation fund for victims and acknowledge its responsibility for what they say were insufficient checks on what was going on within private schools, and in particular boarding schools.
Among the measures they call for are regular, unannounced inspections of all schools and enhanced training for all school staff on detecting and handling abuse. They say inspections in private schools, unlike for public schools, are way too rare.
Asked to comment on the report, government spokesperson Sophie Primas expressed her solidarity with the victims but did not say what new policies the government could adopt.
Alain Esquerre, a whistleblower in the Betharram case and a spokesperson for the victims, welcomed the report's findings.
"Over the decades, this school did anything and everything with the children," he told RTL radio on Wednesday. REUTERS