France Bétharram School Scandal: What Kept Absed Children From Speaking Out For So Long
Even the daughter of French Prime Minister François Bayrou revealed that she kept secret for 30 years a violent physical assault she suffered as a pupil at Bétharram, a Catholic school in southwest France. Her silence echoes that of many others — a reflection of how difficult it is, both for abused children to speak and for society to hear their voices.
François Bayrou says he was astonished. The French prime minister learned, 35 years after the incident, that his daughter Hélène was abused at a summer camp organized by the clergy running the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school in southwestern France. 'As a father, it stabs me in the heart,' Bayrou said on the eve of the release of a book by a former student of that school, Le Silence de Bétharram ('Bétharram's Silence').
His eldest daughter describes being 'beaten up' by a priest at the age of 14. Father Lartiguet reportedly dragged her along the floor for several meters, kicking and punching her, in the presence of many of her classmates. Hélène Perlant never said a word to her parents about this scene of brutality, which caused her to urinate in her bed the following night. 'Not a single allusion, to anyone,' she told Paris Match magazine. And that, for 30 years.
Like her, many students who suffered physical as well as sexual abuse at Bétharram kept silent for decades before joining the recent…
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