Members of a campaign group formed by victims of France’s most prolific paedophile, a former surgeon whose trial ended this week, are outraged at the lack of response by authorities, and questioned why an official investigative commission hasn’t been established into the case that involved the abuse of hundreds of children.
A prosecutor has requested the maximum 20-year sentence fo Joel Le Scouarnec, who is accused of 111 rapes and 189 sexual assaults on 299 victims, mostly of minors under 15, at a dozen hospitals in western France.
The 74-year-old admitted in March to sexually abusing all 299 victims between 1989 and 2014.
Comparisons had been made with – and expectations tied to – last year’s Pelicot mass rape trial in southern France and the massive global attention it garnered.
Instead, the trial of Le Scouarnec came to an end this week amid widespread frustration.
“I’m exhausted. I’m angry. I don’t have much hope. Society seems indifferent. It’s frightening to think the rapes could happen again,” one of Le Scouarnec’s victims, Manon Lemoine (36), told the BBC.
Lemoine and some 50 other victims, stung by an apparent lack of public interest in the trial, have formed their own campaign group to pressure the French authorities, accusing the government of ignoring a “landmark” case which exposed a “true laboratory of institutional failures”.
The group has questioned why a parliamentary commission has not been set up, as in other high-profile abuse cases, and spoken of being made to feel “invisible”, as if “the sheer number of victims prevented us from being recognised”.
Some of the victims, most of whom had initially chosen to testify anonymously, have now decided to reveal their identities in public – even posing for photos – in the hope of jolting France into paying more attention and, perhaps, learning lessons about a culture of deference that helped a prestigious surgeon to rape with impunity for decades.
Myriam Guedj-Benayoun, a lawyer representing several of Le Scouarnec’s victims, in her closing arguments to the court, condemned what she called France's “systemic, organised silence” regarding child abuse.
She spoke of a patriarchal society in which men in respected positions like medicine remained almost beyond reproach, and pointed to “the silence of those who knew, those who looked the other way, and those who could have – should have – raised the alarm”.
The court heard in excruciating detail how Le Scouarnec (74), wallowed in his paedophilia, carefully detailing each child rape in a succession of black notebooks, often preying on his vulnerable young patients while they were under anaesthetic or recovering from surgery.
The court has also been told of the retired surgeon’s growing isolation, and of what his own lawyer described as “your descent into hell”, in the final decade before he was caught, in 2017, after abusing a neighbour’s six-year-old daughter.
By the end, alone in a filthy house, drinking heavily and ostracised by many of his relatives, Le Scouarnec was spending much of his time watching violent images of child rape online, and obsessing over a collection of lifelike child-sized dolls.
Many commentators have noted how the Le Scouarnec trial, like the Pelicot case, has exposed the deep institutional failings which enabled the surgeon to continue his rapes long after they could have been detected and stopped.
At Le Scouarnec’s trial a succession of medical officials have explained – some ashamedly, others self-servingly – how an overstretched rural healthcare system chose, for years, to ignore the fact that the surgeon had been reported by America’s FBI in 2004 after using a credit card to pay to download videos of child rapes on his computer.
“I was advised not to talk about such and such a person,” said one doctor who’d tried to sound the alarm.
“There is a shortage of surgeons, and those who show up are welcomed like the messiah,” said a hospital director.
Another connection between the Pelicot and Le Scouarnec cases is what they’ve both revealed about our understanding – or lack of understanding – of trauma.
Without warning or support, Gisèle Pelicot had been abruptly confronted by police with the video evidence of her own drugging and rapes, orchestrated by her husband.
Later, during the trial, some defence lawyers and other commentators sought to minimise her suffering by pointing to the fact that she’d been unconscious during the rapes – as if trauma only exists, like a wound, when its scar is visible to the naked eye.
In the Le Scouarnec case, French police appear to have gone about searching for the paedophile’s many victims in a similarly brusque manner, summoning people for an unexplained interview and then informing them, out of the blue, that they’d been listed in the surgeon’s notebooks.
The reactions of Le Scouarnec’s many victims have varied widely. Some have simply chosen not to engage with the trial, or with a childhood experience of which they have no memory.
For others, news of the abuse has affected them profoundly.
“I have no memories and I’m already damaged,” said another.
“It turned me upside down,” a policeman admitted.
And then there is a different group of people who have found that knowledge of their abuse has been revelatory, enabling them to make sense of things they had not previously understood about themselves or their lives.
Some have connected their childhood abuse to a general sense of unhappiness, or poor behaviour, or failure in life.
For others, the links have been much more specific, helping to explain a litany of mysterious symptoms and behaviours, from a fear of intimacy to repeated genital infections and eating disorders.
Having confessed to his crimes, Le Scouarnec will inevitably receive a guilty verdict and will almost certainly remain in prison for the rest of his life.
Two of his victims took their own lives some years before the trial – a fact which he acknowledged in court with the same penitent but formulaic apology that he’s offered to everyone else.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Surgeon admits he is ‘a pervert’ and abused children
Staff ‘turned blind eye’ to rape-accused French surgeon’s crimes, trial hears
French surgeon on trial for sexually abusing hundreds of children