A preliminary investigation was opened after the filing of twenty complaints from former students of a private establishment in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques for acts of violence and sexual assault and rape committed forty years ago, communicated the public prosecutor’s office of Pau. The complaints, revealed by La République des Pyrénées, relate “mainly to acts of violence, but also, for five of them, to acts of sexual assault and/or rape”, specifies the public prosecutor of Pau, Rodolphe Jarry.
These acts were allegedly committed mainly in the early 1980s within the confines of the Notre-Dame de Bétharram Catholic high school, which accommodates around 280 students, in Lestelle-Bétharram, between Pau and Lourdes.
The complaints, which target religious and lay people, concern facts that are for the most part prescribed today, but “one of the victims is not yet affected by the prescription, so his complaint could support the others”, specifies Alain Esquerre, complainant and student at Bétharram from 1980 to 1985.
“They hid themselves in their silence.”
It was by creating a Facebook group to collect testimonies about the violence suffered in the establishment that he discovered stories of sexual assault. “People tell you about their distress, things they suffered at the age of 10 or 12 and which they have never told anyone. They hid in their silence while some live 10 kilometers away,” he told Agence France-Presse.
This former student “suffered and saw physical violence on a daily basis” and denounces a “well-established operating procedure” in this elitist institution. “Children were treated like cattle,” he sums up.
Contacted, the head of the establishment, Father Jean-Marie Ruspil, said he was “saddened” and considered “very regrettable that violence could have been used against children and adolescents”. “Since November, I myself have received testimonies from former students who were surprised, not to say shocked,” who “regret that the good memories of alumni are not highlighted,” adds. he.
These complaints will also be filed before the Church Recognition and Reparation Commission, created for victims of sexual abuse in the Church. In 2017, a canonical investigation had already been carried out by the bishopric of Bayonne, following the denunciation of sexual abuse committed against a former student, aged 10 at the time of the facts he denounced, by a priest. The Church’s investigation concluded that the case had been dismissed. The religious man killed himself in 2000.
