The biggest child abuse trial in French history will open in Brittany this month amid anger that a surgeon was allegedly able to attack hundreds of young patients over decades, targeting some when they were under anaesthetic, in the post-surgery recovery room or in their hospital beds.
Questions are likely to be raised over child protection amid testimony from a record number of the alleged victims of Joël Le Scouarnec (73) who worked as a digestive surgeon. He worked in public and private hospitals across Brittany – in northwestern France – and the west of the country, often operating on children with appendicitis.
In 2004, he was flagged to the French authorities by the FBI for viewing child abuse imagery on the dark web, for which he was convicted and given a four-year suspended prison sentence in 2005, but was never banned from working with children and continued to work in hospitals across the country.
The Guardian reports that evidence in the four-month trial will include handwritten notebooks in which Le Scouarnec listed patients’ initials and his alleged crimes against them. Some of the children were unconscious and under anaesthetic at the time.
He is charged with the rape or sexual assault of 299 patients – 158 male and 141 female, with 256 of them under 15. The average age was 11. The abuse stretched from 1989 to 2014.
Public prosecutor Stéphane Kellenberger said: “Numerous victims were in the operating theatre, under anaesthetic, recovering after surgery, in a state of sedation or having been put to sleep, meaning they weren’t able to realise what was done to them.”
He said Le Scouarnec had accepted some of the charges against him. “He explained his modus operandi, his determination to act this way … and his strategies of dissimulation so he wouldn’t risk being discovered.”
Le Scouarnec has partially admitted some charges, not others.
Francesca Satta is a lawyer for 10 of the victims, including the families of two men who committed suicide after police told them what had allegedly happened to them. “… To my knowledge there has never been a child abuse trial with so many victims anywhere in the world,” she said.
Satta added that it was devastating for many of the alleged victims, now in their 30s and 40s, to hear passages from Le Scouarnec’s diaries that concerned them as children.
In 2017, neighbours had reported Le Scouarnec to police. A police raid on his house uncovered abuse imagery, the notebooks and, hidden under floorboards, a collection of dolls.
In 2020, he was sentenced to 15 years for assaulting four children, one of them a hospital patient. He is currently in prison.
Satta said the 2020 trial, which was not held in public, had revealed “a manipulator, with no empathy or comprehension of other people, whom he considered as sexual objects”. That trial showed Le Scouarnec “lived in a bubble of child abuse”, she said.
It was the first time Satta had seen a police officer weep because of the impact of evidence. She said the second trial, in which Le Scouarnec faces 20 years in prison, would show how failings by the justice and health system had enabled him to keep offending.
“In a way, this is the trial of a whole of society. At the time in France there was a type of respect for so-called notable people in society, lawyers or doctors and surgeons. These people were trusted and weren’t seen to commit crimes.”
Frédéric Benoist, a lawyer for the child-protection charity La Voix de L’Enfant (The Child’s Voice), a civil party in the case, highlighted what he called a shocking “chain of failings and dysfunction” at an institutional level that had allowed Le Scouarnec to continue offending for years. Benoist has filed a separate legal complaint on behalf of the charity for failure in the duty to protect people at an institutional level.
Benoist said that when the FBI first informed the French authorities of Le Scouarnec’s online activity in 2004, he was not arrested at home in a dawn raid, but was instead invited to the police station. When his home was later searched, no evidence was found. But police did not search his hospital office, where they would have found images on his work computer and dolls locked in a cupboard.
Le Scouarnec had argued that he had been at a difficult moment in his marriage and his looking at the child abuse imagery was a one-off mistake.
Benoist said that when Le Scouarnec was convicted in 2005 for accessing child abuse imagery online, the judge did not oblige him to undergo psychiatric treatment, nor prevent him from working with children.
The court, contrary to rules, did not immediately inform the hospital system nor the national medical council. But a doctor at the hospital where Le Scouarnec was working alerted management in 2006 to what he felt was Le Scouarnec’s strange attitude and worrying comments and told management about his conviction, which he had read about in the media.
Another emergency room doctor also alerted that Le Scouarnec had looked at child abuse imagery while on duty.
Still, Le Scouarnec continued working in hospitals.
Benoist said: “The dysfunction on so many levels led to the disaster that is this case.”
Le Scouarnec’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. The trial opens on 24 February and will run until June.
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