Their teachers beat them, and no one helped. Now they’re seeking justice.
| Paris
Pascale Gélie has repressed some of the violence he lived through as a 14-year-old student at a private Catholic boarding school in southwest France in 1989.
But some days, the memories of what he witnessed wash over him: teachers punching students in the head, slapping them, or forcing them to stand outside all night long as punishment.
“I told my parents, ‘Get me out of here.’ But they said, ‘You begged us to go; you’re going to finish,’” says Mr. Gélie, who attended the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school for one year. “Between us [students], we didn’t talk about it. We each stayed in our corners.”
Why We Wrote This
The scope of abuse at the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school has shocked the French public. But the survivors of the violence are taking the opportunity to reclaim their agency and trying to force the private school system to change.
Today, he is part of a 2,000-strong victims advocacy group that is breaking that silence, as former students at Bétharram come forward with testimonies of physical and sexual violence – including rape – between 1950 and the 2010s.
Over 200 complaints – half of which involve sexual abuse – have been lodged against the school, making it the biggest abuse case involving minors in France’s private Catholic school system. Accusers from at least a half dozen other private Catholic boarding schools are also coming forward with similar testimonies of abuse, some of which date back 40 or 50 years.
The revelations have created a movement similar to the #MeToo sexual abuse awareness campaign, along with a sense here that the taboo around talking about physical and sexual violence against minors is weakening. As more survivors feel empowered to come forward and talk about their abuse, French society as a whole has had to listen – giving survivors more control over their destiny.
“This is not just my fight but everyone’s fight, and we’re trying to do it with dignity,” says Alain Esquerre, a former student at Bétharram who has led the campaign against the school. “We’re finally starting to understand that what happened back then was not OK. We’re finally being listened to. But we can’t stop now.”
When corporal punishment was acceptable
Set in a picturesque town by a river in the Pyrenees mountains, Bétharram – run by the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Bétharram – has welcomed students since 1837. It has largely enjoyed unquestioning respect from parents, both due to its own standing and for the prestige that French parents universally associate with the private Catholic school system.
But former students who attended during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, when most of the abuse is alleged to have taken place, say some corporal punishment was socially acceptable in French schools at the time.
“We were hit over the head or slapped in front of everyone. It was a form of public humiliation,” says Gilles Parent, the spokesperson for the victims group of Saint-François Xavier d’Ustaritz, a private school in the Pays-Basque region.
It was not a secret that such things went on at private Catholic boarding schools, says Mr. Parent. Bétharram was known anecdotally in the region as being the severest. “My father’s response to [school] abuse was, ‘Well, maybe that will teach you to not make mistakes next time.’ Other parents would use these schools to threaten their children: ‘If you don’t behave, we’ll send you to Bétharram.’”
But despite the rumors, not much was known publicly about what was going on there. Even though Bétharram and other private schools were under government contract – meaning they received funding from the state – they were not being officially monitored.
A recent parliamentary study found that the government inspects the 7,500 private schools that it helps fund at a rate of just five per year, and that most of the inspections focus on schools’ budgets, not on their staff.
“These schools are closed environments, inward-focused and out of the public eye,” says Michel Fize, a sociologist who studies violence in the French school system. “That makes it much easier for abuse, rape, and other bad behavior to take place.”
“We are not going to let it go”
It was in 2021, after a Catholic Church-initiated independent commission reported it had found 108,000 cases of sexual abuse in French private schools since 1950, that survivors and victims’ advocacy groups began to really coordinate.
“When the report came out, [survivors] started to organize on social media, get groups together,” says Arnaud Gallais, co-founder and president of Mouv’Enfants, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting violence against children. “We felt mocked, like we had already spoken out, but no one had done anything. Now, we are not going to let it go.”
Mr. Gélie and Mr. Esquerre have worked with victims from other schools to help them create Facebook and WhatsApp groups, speak to the press, and use their strength in numbers. There are now eight collectives representing thousands of survivors of private school abuse across France.
Accounts of abuse have snowballed. And the Bétharram case took on a political hue when a journalistic investigation published in February by Mediapart alleged that Prime Minister François Bayrou had been aware of the abuse while he was minister of education in the 1990s. His eldest daughter has since said that she herself had suffered abuse at Bétharram in the 1980s. Mr. Bayrou, whose wife once taught catechism at the school, is due to appear before a parliamentary inquiry Wednesday.
“Not every scandal reaches the proportions this one has, and there is a mysterious alchemy to the way this affair has gotten so much attention,” says Arnaud Mercier, a professor of communication at the Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas. But he attributes the publicity partly to “the capacity of victims to get organized and assert themselves.
“It’s also due to the current climate, where a certain number of scandals in the Catholic Church have come out,” he says. “Now we’re more ready to hear victims and to believe them.”
Is change afoot?
While the #MeToo movement has set the stage for French society to listen when survivors of abuse come forward, there is still some hesitancy within families to accept what happened at Bétharram.
“We talk about freeing the taboo [around abuse], but many victims don’t want to hurt their parents,” says Mr. Esquerre. “For those who do share, we have parents responding with, ‘What do you want from all this? Why didn’t you speak up before? Do you want money? Are you trying to kill me?’”
But there is a sense that the level of abuse that once took place in French schools is no longer possible today. Society has evolved, say observers, and the threat of being filmed on a student’s smartphone – and being publicly shamed – is ever-present.
In mid-March, the Bétharram priests launched a new truth commission, including representatives from victims groups and members of a previous commission, to inquire into the potentially systemic causes of the yearslong abuse. The priests also apologized for the abuse, admitting their responsibility and promising to compensate their victims.
This month, the secretary-general of Catholic education in France announced the launch of an awareness campaign that will include informational posters to be displayed in schools, giving emergency phone numbers and advice for teachers and students on how to identify and call attention to abuse.
Parent groups say it is a good start to protecting children, and that the days of defending bad behavior in schools are over.
“We need to listen [to students] better, believe them, and break the silence,” says Hélène Laubignat, president of Apel, a national nonprofit that represents parents of students in Catholic education. “They need to know that they can speak out and they won’t be punished for it. This is an opportunity to do better.”
