A Summer of Child Sex Scandals Jolts France

Even in this season of revealed, repeated horrors, the case prosecutors here are developing is a shocker: A mother is accused of renting her 9-year-old daughter to a neighbor in his 70s so he could fondle her and photograph and videotape the incidents in the woods. The price per session was 200 francs, or $34.50, authorities say.

“It leads you to ask yourself, ‘What is going on in our society?’ ” commented a member of the prosecutors’ office in this southwestern port city. “Are telephone sex lines and sexual innuendo in so many advertisements and the omnipresence of sex in movies and on television having some awful side effects that end up victimizing our children?”

This summer, not a week goes by without allegations or revelations of new acts of sexual molestation in which some of France’s 13.5 million boys and girls younger than 15 are the targets. Among the accused are some of the most trusted figures in society--priests, teachers and summer youth camp counselors.

“What scares parents is that it can be anyone,” said Annie Gaudiere, who runs a toll-free national telephone help line in Paris for victimized and abused children. “The problem is that anyone children are close to becomes a suspect.”

Like 50-year-old gym teacher Bernard Hanse, who was accused, perhaps without justification, by a 13-year-old pupil of sexual assault. Last month, Hanse drove his car under a tree outside the Champagne region village of Orbay-l’Abbaye, parked and then shot himself in the head. His brother, Alain Hanse, accused politicians of stirring up a national frenzy that led to his brother’s suicide.

“Let’s remember those politicians who recently were saying, ‘Let’s stamp out pedophilia from the national educational system, let’s look at each teacher as a potential pedophile,’ ” the angry Hanse said.

Last year, it was neighboring Belgium that was convulsed by shock and horror when police charged Marc Dutroux, 40, an out-of-work electrician, with kidnapping at least six girls, imprisoning them in an underground cell he built and sexually assaulting his prisoners. At least two of the four girls whose bodies have been recovered starved to death in their dungeon after Dutroux, a convicted child rapist, was arrested.

The Dutroux affair rocked the small European country because of blunders committed by police and prosecutors in investigating the abductions and the high-level protection that Dutroux and his accomplices appeared to many to enjoy.

This year, it has been France’s turn to realize how vulnerable its children can be.

In large part, law enforcement officials and social workers involved with protecting minors point out, it is the tragic events in Belgium that have awakened French authorities and citizens to the potential risks, that encouraged victims to come forward and that are forcing police to take the claims more seriously.

The French, who usually are relaxed in their attitudes about matters relating to sex, have traditionally been more reluctant to deal with instances in which an adult abused a position of trust and authority to sexually victimize a child.

But soon after taking office last month, Segolene Royal, minister for schools in the new Socialist-led government, said she was scandalized by the “self-defense reflex” of school administrators inclined to protect alleged pedophiles on their staffs.

A child’s version of what happened was, more often than not, dismissed out of hand as fantasy or a fabrication, as in a 1967 film, starring the late Jacques Brel, in which a village teacher is wrongly accused of attempted rape by a girl. Now, however, Royal said, “the word of the child is starting to be rehabilitated. . . . We are removing the law of silence, and it is a good thing.”

According to a report circulated among education officials this month, and quoted in Le Monde newspaper, “nearly one child in 10” is a victim of sexual violence in France. In nearly 90% of the cases, the aggressor is the father or stepfather, the circular said. In most of the other cases, it is a teacher or someone else in authority.

The psychological damage can be irreparable. Many of the 800 annual suicides by French youngsters occur, Royal said, “because they are subjected to sexual aggression that destroys them.” Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou has vowed “repression without delay and without weakness” for the aggressors.

Last month, in what was reportedly the largest police dragnet in French history, gendarmes in nearly all parts of the country--and as far away as the South Pacific island territories of New Caledonia and French Polynesia--raided the homes of suspected purchasers of pornographic videotapes that depict sex acts committed by or involving children.

“We’re not talking about cassettes of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ ” said prosecutor Jean-Louis Coste, who spearheaded the crackdown on video kiddie porn, which is outlawed in France. “These are little girls of 13 who are raped by big-bellied grandfathers of 70, these are 14-year-old boys gang-raped by adults, these are children that you can see were made drunk or drugged before being abused by a whole series of adults.”

In the countrywide sweep, which began at 6 a.m. and mobilized 2,500 gendarmes, 815 people had their residences searched. Five suspects committed suicide soon afterward, prompting civil rights groups to accuse authorities of engaging in a “witch hunt” to seize the media’s attention.

A Bordeaux elementary school teacher, Gerard Pic, 39, didn’t have any of the banned cassettes at home. But police found more than 3,000 color slides that Pic--who also worked as a summer camp counselor for Air France--had taken of boys in states of undress, some of which prosecutors say showed youngsters baring their buttocks or in lewd poses. The teacher spent a night in jail, was charged with corrupting the morals of minors and possession of child pornography. He then was released.

One Saturday morning, Pic, a bachelor, drove onto the highest bridge spanning the Garonne River, left his car motor running and jumped 250 feet into the dark, swirling water. His body was found on a Bordeaux riverbank.

“It is the only solution to the torrent of mud, hatred and stupidity that has surged up,” Pic explained in a suicide note to his sister Evelyne. “For me, it’s a relief.”

Pic’s sister and mother have retained one of Bordeaux’s best-known attorneys, Benoit Ducos-Ader, to bring charges against authorities for leaking information about the investigation so Pic allegedly could be identified in the nameless accounts that appeared in the local newspaper.

“A wind of madness is blowing in France,” said Ducos-Ader, who claimed that overzealous police and prosecutors had confused Pic’s lifelong passion for nudism with pedophilia. “He didn’t have any of the cassettes at his home but felt that his arrest definitively cataloged him as a pedophile and a rapist of young boys.”

With the suicides, a debate has begun about whether too much publicity is being given to the kiddie-porn raids, to alleged sexual attacks on children and to missing-child cases like that of 10-year-old Marion Wajon, who disappeared in November in the southwestern town of Agen while she was on the way home from school for lunch.

“Pedophilia seems to have become at once the obsession, the paranoia and the scapegoat for a society stricken with excessive pessimism,” Olivier Peretie wrote in the left-leaning weekly newsmagazine Nouvel Observateur.

“No, the media will never say too much about pedophile crimes,” came the stern retort from actress Carole Bouquet, who belongs to a committee supporting a national campaign on behalf of abused children. “I even think people don’t talk enough about it. To remain silent when one knows is equivalent to becoming an accomplice in crime.”

Prosecutors, forced to justify their actions, said that, in last month’s raids, they uncovered evidence about six acts of rape and 29 acts of sexual molestation against minors. One man in southern France was jailed on charges of raping two children in his village and videotaping the act.

Near Narbonne in the south, a stock of more than 200 videocassettes depicting child sex was seized from a clergyman’s residence. In Saint-Mihiel in eastern France, a mayor’s deputy resigned after being investigated.

“Human rights are also those of raped women and victimized children,” declared Coste, government prosecutor in the city of Macon, north of Lyons. “These are the people we should be defending first, before people who were in possession of pedophile cassettes of this type.”

This month, near Grenoble, another cassette turned up that showed nude young children striking “suggestive poses” in what appeared to be a French school classroom. Four hundred gendarmes were mobilized to hunt for the school and the tape’s maker.

Nevertheless, the spate of suicides among suspects has been enough for some officials to urge prudence in future investigations.

Royal, the minister for schools, said a balance must be struck between “respect for a child’s word and the presumption of innocence.” To help sift facts from rumor, Royal last week announced the formation of centers across France that school administrators and teachers will be able to consult before taking a suspected case of pedophilia to police and prosecutors.

Since the new French penal code was adopted in 1992, anyone found in possession of a videocassette or photo depicting a sex act involving a minor can be sentenced to up to five years in prison and fined a maximum of 2.5 million francs ($430,000). Although “pedophilia” in itself is not explicitly mentioned in the code, anyone found guilty of a sex act with a minor younger than 15 can be sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Recent changes in the law also allow a victim of sexual attacks to press charges up to 10 years after reaching adulthood, another reason for the large number of cases now cropping up.

In the small village of Vavincourt in Lorraine in eastern France, a popular Roman Catholic clergyman, Abbot Jean-Marie Vincent, 63, the director of a local boys choir, was seized by police in June and charged with abusing his authority by allegedly raping and otherwise assaulting some of his charges, ages 11 to 15.

The bespectacled abbot had received a bevy of government decorations for organizing summer youth camps and for his work with the Little Singers of Bar-le-Duc. The group’s third CD, now being mixed in Paris, includes a song written by Vincent and dedicated “to the victims of ‘big bad men.’ ”

Soon after his arrest, police said he admitted committing the acts.

“It’s a bit as though the sky had fallen on our head,” Alain Noel, treasurer of the parish management council, told a local newspaper. “We now have to think of the children who were victims of his actions, more than about him.”

In Chateaurenard, in the Loire Valley, a school director drowned himself in a river this summer after being arraigned on charges of sexually attacking a minor.

This month, Guy-Claude Berger, 67, a New Age guru who advocates eating only raw food as part of his doctrine of “instinctotherapy,” was jailed on charges that he sexually abused children at the chateau near Provins southeast of Paris that serves as headquarters for his sect.

On the Mediterranean island of Corsica, prosecutors demanded a court injunction that would bar Father Jose Antonini, accused of fondling a 14-year-old boy spending school vacations in his home, from getting too close to children.

In Fos-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, primary school principal Paulette Luengo was indicted for not having alerted her superiors about a 42-year-old teacher, Gerard Ghazli, suspected of having sexually molested seven girls, ages 8 to 11. Instead, Luengo pressed the teacher to take sick leave, then suspended him. He has since been arrested and charged.

“The national education system doesn’t want to see anything,” asserts Gaudiere, director of the hotline for abused children, which can be reached from anywhere in France by dialing 119. “Go to them with a complaint, and they’ll tell us, ‘But this person is a fantastic teacher. He gets excellent results from his classes on the final examinations.’ ”

The increased awareness of the sexual menaces to children occurs at a time when an estimated 3 million French youngsters are supposed to be leaving for summer camps or outdoor recreation centers.

“This year, there are a lot of questions about the teams of monitors,” as camp counselors are known here, noted Virginie Sabatier of the Leo Legrange Federation, which runs summer camps and trains counselors. “Parents want to know how many there are, where they come from.”

At the child-help hotline in Paris, calls have nearly tripled since last year, to 8,000 a day. Many of the calls now come from parents, worried about the dangers their children may face at school, in camp or any time they leave home.

Staff members of the National Telephone Center for Abused Children, while welcoming the new willingness of the French to talk about a topic that was once nearly taboo, are worried that the recent avalanche of media coverage is distracting the public from what should be an even bigger concern.

“Families talk about pedophilia, but when it takes place outside the family,” Gaudiere said. “My fear is that what is going on now will cover up the real problem: physical, emotional and sexual violence committed against children in their own families.”

The hotline director herself had a recent taste of how suspicious French parents have become as, day after day, newspapers and television bare new facts or allegations concerning pedophilia. In a store across the street from the office, Gaudiere asked a boy to keep her place in line. When she returned, his mother had appeared, and asked, “So, you are the person who was bothering my son?”

“Now in Paris, you feel that, if you smile at a baby in the Metro, people will get antsy,” she said.