France is preparing to start the trial of the former Surgeon Joel Le Scouarnec (73), the accused of sexual abuse of 299 children, most of his former patients, between 1989. and 2014, mostly in Brittany. The accusations include attacks and rape, often while victims were under anesthesia. Le Scouarnec admitted some of the charges, but not all, he writes in the report from the BBC trial.
The trial, which will be held in Vannes in the northwest of France, is the largest case of child abuse in the history of the country.
The process is expected to last from February to June this year. During the investigation, the police found children’s sex in Le Scowarnec’s home, more than 300,000 paintings of child abuse and thousands of diaries in which he described the attacks on his young patients for 25 years. He claims that these records were just “fantasies.”
This case raises questions about whether Le Scournec’s colleagues and hospital administrations in which he worked ignored or covered his actions.
Namely, the FBI warned the French authority that Le Scouarnec visited websites with the content of child abuse, after which he only received a suspended sentence.
Also, members of his family were allegedly aware of his pedophilia, but they did nothing to stop him.
Le Scouarnec is in custody since 2017. year, when he was arrested under suspicion of the rape of his nieces, now in thirty years, as well as six-year-old girls and a young patient. In 2020. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The trial will be an opportunity for victims to present their testimonies and for examining institutional omissions that enabled the alleged abuse of teaching for decades.
The lawyers of the victims point out that Le Scouarnec enjoyed too long “impunity silence” and that trial is a key moment for justice.
Some of his former patients, and now everyone in adulthood, they said they remember how surgeons touched them under the pretext of medical examinations, sometimes even while their parents or other doctors were in the room.
However, as a large number of its alleged victims were influenced by the anesthetics when the attacks did not remember them and were shocked when the police contacted them and informed that their names were reportedly recorded, allegedly recorded in Le Scouarnec’s diaries.
Le Scouarnec felt omnipotent and enjoyed the feeling of flirting with the danger through the calculated attacks, the Judicial Order against the former surgeon, according to the writing of the French diary Le Monde.
Some of the victims stated that the disturbing discoveries helped them understand the unexplained symptoms of trauma that burded them all their lives.
The trial will open severe issues about institutions and justice failures. When Le Scouarnec 2000s were under suspicion, after the FBI warning that he approached the pyrnography pages, the French authorities sentenced him only to a parentary of the four months without the obligation of medical or psychological treatment.
Even when the colleagues of the doctors in 2006. expressed doubts, the Regional Medical Chamber did not introduce any sanctions, and all members who refrained from one, voted that he did not violate the Code of Ethics.
Prosecutors also claim that the members of Le Scowarnec’s family knew about his disturbing behavior towards the children, but they did nothing, but his ex-wife claimed she knew nothing.
One of the lawyers working on the case, Frédéric Benoist, said the closed process would be a tragedy: “This must be a moment in which victims will speak,” he concluded.
(Type / Source: FENA / PHOTO: Illustration)
