Latest news with #JoëlLeScouarnec
New Straits Times
19-07-2025
- Health
- New Straits Times
France probes authorities over failure to stop doctor's child abuse
PARIS: The French judiciary has launched an investigation into the failure of authorities to check on a hospital doctor who continued abusing nearly 300, mostly underaged, patients for over a period of 25 years, before he was convicted, reported German Press Agency (dpa). The investigation is being conducted into "intentional failure to prevent crimes and offences against the physical integrity of persons," said prosecutor Stéphane Schellenberger on Friday in the western town of Lorient. Joël Le Scouarnec, a retired doctor, was sentenced to 20 years in prison at the end of May after confessing to abusing a total of 158 male and 141 female patients, with the average age of his victims being 11, between 1989 and 2014. The investigation does not target specific individuals, but instead probes into the steps taken by the health authorities, clinic managers, and other medical staff in connection with the abuse. It remains unclear why the health authorities failed to stop the abuse, despite the doctor having already received a suspended sentence concerning a child pornography case in 2005. Some of the perpetrator's colleagues had raised the alarm, but the surgeon had moved to another hospital without facing disciplinary action.
Telegraph
09-06-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Just how psychopathic are surgeons?
These are the people we trust to hold a sharpened knife above our bare bellies and press down until they see blood. We let them tinker with our hearts, brains and bowels while we lie unconscious beneath their gloved hands. Surgeons live in a world of terrifying margins, where the difference of a millimetre can be the difference between life and death. That level of precision demands an extraordinary calm, or what you could also call a cold detachment. But what happens when that same self-possession curdles into something darker? In recent weeks, two surgeons have made headlines for all the wrong reasons. In France, Joël Le Scouarnec was sentenced for abusing hundreds of children – some while they lay anaesthetised in his care. In the UK, plastic surgeon Peter Brooks was convicted of the attempted murder of fellow consultant Graeme Perks, whom he stabbed after breaking into his home in Nottinghamshire. Today, Brooks was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 22 years at Loughborough Courthouse. It would, of course, be absurd to taint an entire profession with the acts of two individuals. But it does resurface a long-standing, uncomfortable question: might the very traits that make a surgeon brilliant also mask something far more troubling? 'When people hear the word psychopath, they tend to think of serial killers and rapists,' says Dr Kevin Dutton, a psychologist and the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths. 'But the truth is that certain psychopathic traits – focus, emotional dispassion, ruthlessness, self-confidence – can predispose you to success, and in an operating theatre, they really come to the fore.' Dutton has spent much of his career trying to prove that 'bad psychopaths' – people who have these characteristics but who can't regulate them – are the ones who commit crimes. A 'good psychopath', by contrast, is someone who can dial those qualities up and down at whim. He recalls one neurosurgeon who was regularly brought to tears by bits of classical music, but who also said, 'Emotion is entropy. I have hunted it to extinction over the years.' Similarly, a cardiothoracic surgeon told him that once a patient was under, he no longer saw them as a person – just a piece of meat. 'Once you care, you are walking an emotional tightrope,' says Dutton, 'but if you see the human body in front of you as a puzzle to solve, then you are more likely to save their life.' 'There's a ruthless part of me' Gabriel Weston, a London-based surgeon and the author of Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story, describes her profession as one that requires you to 'flick off a switch'. Sent to boarding school at a young age (much of British surgery is the product of elite schools), Weston learnt early how to detach emotionally – a skill she found served her well in the theatre. 'If you asked my family, they'd say I'm very emotional in that I cry in films or at art or literature,' she says. 'But there's a ruthless part of me. I use that in surgery – and in other parts of life where emotion just gets in the way.' Over time, Weston learnt to distinguish between two kinds of surgeons: those who switch their feelings back on once they leave the operating room, and those who never do. 'They don't just have psychopathic traits,' she says. 'They live in that space permanently.' They can also come with a reputation for being not just difficult, but dangerous. Harry Thompson*, a British abdominal surgeon, describes a world of towering egos and simmering aggression. 'If you think about it, all surgeons were in the top five of their class,' he says. 'They are all very competitive, and many play sports: they want to prove they are better than everyone. And if you are at the forefront of major surgery, you think you are invincible. It's a boiling-house environment of jealousy, envy and hatred.' He recalls one consultant who stabbed a plain-clothes policeman with a disposable scalpel after being stopped for speeding en route to the theatre. Another smashed a ward office clock when a nurse arrived five minutes late. Physical assaults were, he says, more common than you would think. 'I was in one operation when a student, John, was an hour and a half late, because he overslept. The surgeon thumped the student's head against the theatre wall until he was unconscious, screamed, 'Nobody move!' then started kicking him. No one ever saw John again.' Nor is the patient always spared. 'When I was training, I saw one surgeon thump a patient for removing a drain from his own bottom after an operation because it had become painful,' says Thompson. 'The patient only admitted this (in tears) after the surgeon had made the nurses and junior doctors line up and interrogated each one in turn about who had done it.' Thompson used to work with Simon Bramhall – the liver surgeon who made headlines and was later struck off for branding his initials onto patients' livers using a laser. 'Simon had always been a bit mad,' says Thompson. 'He was fascinated by the programme Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and he always wore a white suit [like the character Hopkirk], tie, shoes and socks.' As for tattooing his patients' organs: the initials were discovered by his colleagues only during a second surgery when his once-subtle etching was now grotesquely enlarged by liver damage. While Bramhall's actions sparked public outrage, some in the medical community were nonplussed. Perhaps because this is a far more commonplace occurrence than we realise: an article in Harper's Magazine cited examples of anonymous ophthalmic surgeons who had lasered their initials onto retinas, and orthopaedic surgeons who had etched theirs into bone cement. 'Why would you do that? Ego, of course,' says Dutton, 'and it isn't incidental in surgery. It's selected for. From the moment you start training, you have to fight – quite literally – for your space at the operating table.' 'I find it very freeing not to be pleasant' Dutton researched which of the various disciplines within the profession had the highest rates of psychopathy, and the results are revealing. Number one is neurosurgery (which is bad luck for any fans of Grey's Anatomy), followed by cardiothoracic or heart surgery and then orthopaedic. 'The last one is brutal as you have to smash people's bones,' says Dutton. 'Cardio more than anything is about life and death, but neurosurgery is particularly interesting to me. I think it's because this is the only branch of surgery where, if something goes wrong, you leave the patient permanently crippled or blinded or incapacitated, so only very few people can take such a calculated risk under pressure.' And though these traits are often seen as typically male, women are by no means exempt. Weston says the most difficult surgeon she ever worked under was a woman. 'She was very attractive and well-liked – mostly for being gorgeous and good at her job – but privately she made my life hell. Maybe she didn't like another woman being on the team but she did that horrible thing that women do of presenting this incredibly benign face while being very cruel in private. For months, she blamed me for mistakes that weren't mine, stole credit for my diagnoses, and made me feel like my surgical skills were terrible. She was truly villainous.' And yet, Weston admits, the operating theatre offers her a rare freedom: 'If you are a woman who is quite tough and unsentimental, surgery is a really amazing environment in which you can be yourself. There are many areas of my life – mainly motherhood, but also writing – where there is an expectation that I will be softer than I am. Like Simone de Beauvoir, I find it very freeing not to be pleasant.' Perhaps there is something in all of this (criminal and violent behaviour aside) that we, as patients, secretly find reassuring. We don't want our surgeons to hesitate. We don't want them to be emotional or anxious. We want them to be brilliant: laser-focused, supremely confident, even terrifying if that's what it takes to save us. In life, we dislike arrogance. On the operating table, many of us yearn for it. 'I had one boss,' says Thompson, 'a French surgeon. He used to say: 'There are the porters, the nurses, the managers – and then there are the surgeons. Above them, God. And above God? Me.''
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Just how psychopathic are surgeons?
These are the people we trust to hold a sharpened knife above our bare bellies and press down until they see blood. We let them tinker with our hearts, brains and bowels while we lie unconscious beneath their gloved hands. Surgeons live in a world of terrifying margins, where the difference of a millimetre can be the difference between life and death. That level of precision demands an extraordinary calm, or what you could also call a cold detachment. But what happens when that same self-possession curdles into something darker? In recent weeks, two surgeons have made headlines for all the wrong reasons. In France, Joël Le Scouarnec was sentenced for abusing hundreds of children – some while they lay anaesthetised in his care. In the UK, plastic surgeon Peter Brooks was convicted of the attempted murder of fellow consultant Graeme Perks, whom he stabbed after breaking into his home in Nottinghamshire. Today, Brooks was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 22 years at Loughborough Courthouse. It would, of course, be absurd to taint an entire profession with the acts of two individuals. But it does resurface a long-standing, uncomfortable question: might the very traits that make a surgeon brilliant also mask something far more troubling? 'When people hear the word psychopath, they tend to think of serial killers and rapists,' says Dr Kevin Dutton, a psychologist and the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths. 'But the truth is that certain psychopathic traits – focus, emotional dispassion, ruthlessness, self-confidence – can predispose you to success, and in an operating theatre, they really come to the fore.' Dutton has spent much of his career trying to prove that 'bad psychopaths' – people who have these characteristics but who can't regulate them – are the ones who commit crimes. A 'good psychopath', by contrast, is someone who can dial those qualities up and down at whim. He recalls one neurosurgeon who was regularly brought to tears by bits of classical music, but who also said, 'Emotion is entropy. I have hunted it to extinction over the years.' Similarly, a cardiothoracic surgeon told him that once a patient was under, he no longer saw them as a person – just a piece of meat. 'Once you care, you are walking an emotional tightrope,' says Dutton, 'but if you see the human body in front of you as a puzzle to solve, then you are more likely to save their life.' Gabriel Weston, a London-based surgeon and the author of Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story, describes her profession as one that requires you to 'flick off a switch'. Sent to boarding school at a young age (much of British surgery is the product of elite schools), Weston learnt early how to detach emotionally – a skill she found served her well in the theatre. 'If you asked my family, they'd say I'm very emotional in that I cry in films or at art or literature,' she says. 'But there's a ruthless part of me. I use that in surgery – and in other parts of life where emotion just gets in the way.' Over time, Weston learnt to distinguish between two kinds of surgeons: those who switch their feelings back on once they leave the operating room, and those who never do. 'They don't just have psychopathic traits,' she says. 'They live in that space permanently.' They can also come with a reputation for being not just difficult, but dangerous. Harry Thompson*, a British abdominal surgeon, describes a world of towering egos and simmering aggression. 'If you think about it, all surgeons were in the top five of their class,' he says. 'They are all very competitive, and many play sports: they want to prove they are better than everyone. And if you are at the forefront of major surgery, you think you are invincible. It's a boiling-house environment of jealousy, envy and hatred.' He recalls one consultant who stabbed a plain-clothes policeman with a disposable scalpel after being stopped for speeding en route to the theatre. Another smashed a ward office clock when a nurse arrived five minutes late. Physical assaults were, he says, more common than you would think. 'I was in one operation when a student, John, was an hour and a half late, because he overslept. The surgeon thumped the student's head against the theatre wall until he was unconscious, screamed, 'Nobody move!' then started kicking him. No one ever saw John again.' Nor is the patient always spared. 'When I was training, I saw one surgeon thump a patient for removing a drain from his own bottom after an operation because it had become painful,' says Thompson. 'The patient only admitted this (in tears) after the surgeon had made the nurses and junior doctors line up and interrogated each one in turn about who had done it.' Thompson used to work with Simon Bramhall – the liver surgeon who made headlines and was later struck off for branding his initials onto patients' livers using a laser. 'Simon had always been a bit mad,' says Thompson. 'He was fascinated by the programme Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and he always wore a white suit [like the character Hopkirk], tie, shoes and socks.' As for tattooing his patients' organs: the initials were discovered by his colleagues only during a second surgery when his once-subtle etching was now grotesquely enlarged by liver damage. While Bramhall's actions sparked public outrage, some in the medical community were nonplussed. Perhaps because this is a far more commonplace occurrence than we realise: an article in Harper's Magazine cited examples of anonymous ophthalmic surgeons who had lasered their initials onto retinas, and orthopaedic surgeons who had etched theirs into bone cement. 'Why would you do that? Ego, of course,' says Dutton, 'and it isn't incidental in surgery. It's selected for. From the moment you start training, you have to fight – quite literally – for your space at the operating table.' Dutton researched which of the various disciplines within the profession had the highest rates of psychopathy, and the results are revealing. Number one is neurosurgery (which is bad luck for any fans of Grey's Anatomy), followed by cardiothoracic or heart surgery and then orthopaedic. 'The last one is brutal as you have to smash people's bones,' says Dutton. 'Cardio more than anything is about life and death, but neurosurgery is particularly interesting to me. I think it's because this is the only branch of surgery where, if something goes wrong, you leave the patient permanently crippled or blinded or incapacitated, so only very few people can take such a calculated risk under pressure.' And though these traits are often seen as typically male, women are by no means exempt. Weston says the most difficult surgeon she ever worked under was a woman. 'She was very attractive and well-liked – mostly for being gorgeous and good at her job – but privately she made my life hell. Maybe she didn't like another woman being on the team but she did that horrible thing that women do of presenting this incredibly benign face while being very cruel in private. For months, she blamed me for mistakes that weren't mine, stole credit for my diagnoses, and made me feel like my surgical skills were terrible. She was truly villainous.' And yet, Weston admits, the operating theatre offers her a rare freedom: 'If you are a woman who is quite tough and unsentimental, surgery is a really amazing environment in which you can be yourself. There are many areas of my life – mainly motherhood, but also writing – where there is an expectation that I will be softer than I am. Like Simone de Beauvoir, I find it very freeing not to be pleasant.' Perhaps there is something in all of this (criminal and violent behaviour aside) that we, as patients, secretly find reassuring. We don't want our surgeons to hesitate. We don't want them to be emotional or anxious. We want them to be brilliant: laser-focused, supremely confident, even terrifying if that's what it takes to save us. In life, we dislike arrogance. On the operating table, many of us yearn for it. 'I had one boss,' says Thompson, 'a French surgeon. He used to say: 'There are the porters, the nurses, the managers – and then there are the surgeons. Above them, God. And above God? Me.'' *Names have been changed Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
LeMonde
29-05-2025
- LeMonde
Victims of pedophile surgeon Le Scouarnec express anger and fear after trial's verdict: 'Our voices must go beyond the courtroom, or we will be forgotten'
Everything seemed set in stone before the criminal court in Vannes, Brittany. From the very first day of the hearing, on February 24, it was understood that Joël Le Scouarnec would receive a 20-year prison sentence, the maximum under French law, for the sexual assaults and rapes committed on 299 victims, most of them underage at the time. He himself had already accepted the verdict, acknowledging all the facts, including those that were time-barred, and repeating from the dock: "I am the only one responsible. I am not asking the court for leniency." On Wednesday, May 28, three months later, he was, as expected, sentenced to 20 years in prison, with a period of ineligibility for parole set at two-thirds of his sentence and a strict 15-year judicial supervision. But when it comes to justice, emotions often come into play and feelings can overflow. As predictable as it was, the verdict nonetheless released an outburst of frustration, on the last day of what had until then been a relatively calm trial. As she finished reading the sentence, Aude Buresi, the presiding judge, explained that the five judges had not applied preventive detention, one of the additional measures requested by the prosecutor, Stéphane Kellenberger. The rare and controversial measure allows a convicted person to be kept in a secure medical-judicial center after serving their sentence, based on vague criteria such as "dangerousness" and a "high risk of reoffending." It is like a sentence after the sentence.
The Hindu
29-05-2025
- The Hindu
Former French surgeon sentenced to 20 years in prison for raping, abusing hundreds of patients
A 74-year-old former surgeon was given a maximum 20-year prison sentence on Wednesday (May 28, 2025) by a French Court for the rape and sexual assault of hundreds of patients, mostly children, over more than two decades. Joël Le Scouarnec was sentenced after admitting molesting nearly 300 victims in one of the country's largest-ever child sex abuse cases, which has raised questions about how he was able to abuse so many, for so long. Judges followed the public prosecutor's recommendations regarding the length of the sentence, and the criminal court of Morbihan, in western France, ordered that Le Scouarnec should serve at least two-thirds of the punishment before he can be eligible for release, because he remains dangerous. But the Court did not impose a post-sentence preventive detention, prompting the anger of many victims. Solène Podevin Favre, president of an advocacy group for child victims of incest and other sexual crimes, expressed shock at a verdict 'we might have expected to be less lenient,' lamenting that post-sentence preventive detention was not imposed. 'It's the maximum sentence, certainly,' she said. 'But it's the least we could have hoped for. Yet in six years, he could potentially be released. It's staggering.' Le Scouarnec, who has been jailed since 2017, is already serving a 15-year prison sentence, for a conviction in 2020 for the rape and sexual assault of four children, including two nieces. In French law, sentences run concurrently and Le Scouarnec should only serve the additional years after the first sentence is completed. Post-sentence preventive detention is a measure rarely used in France that applies to the country's most dangerous offenders. Had it been approved, Le Scouarnec could have been held indefinitely in a secure socio-medical facility, even after serving his time. "The Court fully understood the requests from the civil parties that Mr. Le Scouarnec should never be released from prison. It would be demagogic and illusory to make them believe that this is possible," the Court said. 'As things stand, the law does not allow it. And preventive detention, an exceptional measure, could in no way allow the Court to circumvent this reality.' Le Scouarnec's lawyer said his client won't appeal the ruling. The new trial began in February and laid bare a pattern of abuse between 1989 and 2014. Most of the victims were unconscious or sedated hospital patients at the time of the assaults. The average age was 11. Le Scouarnec has confessed to all the sexual abuse alleged by the civil parties, as well as to other assaults that are now beyond the statute of limitations. In a shocking admission during the trial, he also acknowledged sexually abusing his granddaughter — a statement made in front of her visibly distraught parents. During the trial, advocacy groups have accused health authorities of inaction after they were notified as early as 2005 of Le Scouarnec's conviction for possessing child pornography pictures. At the time, no measures were taken to suspend his medical license or limit his contact with children, and Le Scouarnec continued his abuse in hospitals until his arrest in 2017. Child protection groups hope that the case will help strengthen the legal framework to prevent such abuse. Le Scouarnec's trial came as activists continue to push to dismantle taboos that have long surrounded sexual abuse in France. The most prominent case was that of Ms. Gisèle Pélicot, who was drugged and raped by her now ex-husband and dozens of other men who were convicted and sentenced in December to three to 20 years in prison. In a separate case focussing on alleged abuse at a Catholic school, an inquiry commission of the National Assembly, France's lower house of Parliament, is investigating allegations of physical and sexual abuse over five decades. Victims of Le Scouarnec have, however, complained of a perceived lack of attention. "This trial, which could have served as an open-air laboratory to expose the serious failings of our institutions, seems to leave no mark on the government, the medical community, or society at large,' a group of victims said. Not all victims were initially aware they had been abused. Some were contacted by investigators after their names appeared in journals kept by Le Scouarnec, in which he meticulously documented his crimes. Others only realised they had been hospitalised at the time after checking medical records. Two of his victims took their own lives some years before the trial. Using the cover of medical procedures, the former abdominal and digestive surgeon took advantage of moments when children were alone in their hospital rooms. His method was to disguise sexual abuse as clinical care, targeting young patients who were unlikely to remember the encounters. The notebooks, which detail the abuse in graphic language, have become central to the prosecution's case. Despite the scope of the allegations, Le Scouarnec remained calm and composed throughout the trial. 'I didn't see them as people,' he told the Court. 'They were the destination of my fantasies. As the trial went on, I began to see them as individuals, with emotions, anger, suffering and distress.' He said his first act of abuse occurred in 1985, when he raped his 5-year-old niece. While he offered apologies to some victims, his demeanor struck many as detached and emotionless. The Court, however, noted that Le Scouarnec 'made a point of taking responsibility for his actions,' demonstrating 'his intention to make amends for the consequences of his actions.' The case first came to light in April 2017, when a 6-year-old neighbour told her mother that the man next door had exposed himself and touched her through the fence separating their properties. A search of his home uncovered more than 3,00,000 photos, 650 video files, as well as notebooks where he described himself as a pedophile and detailed his actions. A third trial is expected in the coming years, following the emergence of new allegations during this trial, including further abuse involving his granddaughter.
