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Scandal at elite French school, over 200 cases of child abuse

2025-07-01 16:39:34Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Scandal at elite French school, over 200 cases of child abuse

One of the most shocking scandals in French education has been uncovered at the elite Catholic school Notre-Dame de Bétharram, in the south of France, where hundreds of former students have denounced physical violence, rape and systematic sexual abuse that occurred from 1957 to 2004.

Pascal Gélie, one of the victims, recalls how the school, promoted as a place for sports and friendship, turned into “absolute terror.” According to him, children were beaten until they lost consciousness, forced to stand outside in the cold for hours, and subjected to constant humiliation.

“There were 40 of us in a dormitory with broken mattresses. When I whispered to another boy to give me toilet paper for the bathroom, the caretaker grabbed me by the face and showed me the stone terrace outside. Someone told me to take my coat because we might have to stand outside for hours in the cold and damp. They left me there all night. That was just the beginning, regular blows to the head, children beaten so hard they would end up bleeding. I saw one boy whose hair was torn out by the roots. Another was beaten so hard he lost 40% of his hearing. Sometimes they made us stand by the bed for hours at night because someone had whispered, or they would turn our bed over while we were inside. It was real terror,” said Gélie, now a 51-year-old office worker from Bordeaux.

Another testimony is that of Boris, now 51 years old, who now works in event management.

"Bétharram was like a supermarket for sexual predators, and those of us who were sexually abused or raped often had the same profile: fragile children with separated or deceased parents," he said.

He came from a poor single-parent family in Bordeaux and was sent to Bétharram at the age of 13, ironically because his mother wanted to protect him. At the age of 12, he was targeted by a group of abusers in Bordeaux who befriended him at the local swimming pool and sexually abused him for several months.

Some of the most serious cases include priest Pierre Silviet-Carricart, accused of sexually assaulting underage students, one of whom was abused on the very day of his father's funeral. Carricart was arrested but later allowed to flee to Rome, where he committed suicide.

More than 200 legal complaints have been filed, 90 of which involve sexual violence or rape. Only two of these have so far led to criminal charges, as most have passed the statute of limitations.

The scandal is also hitting French politics, as Prime Minister François Bayrou, a former education minister and parent of several students at the school, was asked by Parliament whether he was aware of the abuses and whether he covered them up. He denied any involvement.

Meanwhile, a group of former students have launched an international campaign to contact those affected in countries where the Bétharram order has operated, such as Britain, Brazil, Thailand and Ivory Coast.

This event is expected to bring about a wave of legal reforms, with former students demanding the lifting of deadlines for reporting child sexual abuse.

A parliamentary report with 50 recommendations for preventing violence in education is expected to be published this week, highlighting the state's failure to protect children.


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