The Hearings of the 2006 Parliamentary Commission on Cults

The hearings of the 2006 parliamentary commission on cults

« The influence of movements of a cult character and the consequences of their practices on the physical and mental health of minors »

Extracts and commentary by the CICNS

The full text of our dossier in pdf format to download (this html page being heavy (380Kb), it is recommended to download the pdf version)

The hearings on the National Assembly’s site: http://www.lcpan.fr/sommaire_secte.asp

Introduction

Hearing of M. Roulet

Hearing of M. Jancovici

Hearing of Mme Lebatard

Hearing of M. Groscolas

Hearing of Mme Tabary

Hearing of Mme Picard

Hearing of MM. Dupuis and Polivka

Hearing of M. Leschi

Hearing of M. Rufo

Hearing of M. Machelon

Investigation at Tabitha’s place

Introduction

A parliamentary commission of inquiry on the theme of cults (the third in 11 years) was initiated in June 2006 by Parliament. It aims to evaluate “the influence of movements of a cult character and the consequences of their practices on the physical and mental health of minors”.

We had, from the moment this inquiry was projected, asked for its cancellation given the few relevant elements provided to justify it. The commission ran its course and proceeded to a certain number of hearings.

We have analysed and commented on some of them. The following elements emerge from this analysis:

The project of this commission is not founded on a question but on the peremptory assertion of a generalised dangerousness of so-called cult movements with regard to minors; at the first hearing, the alarming description of the situation given, without supporting it with proofs, by M. Jean-Michel Roulet, president of the MIVILUDES, set the tone for the hearings that followed.

None of the “cult-character” spiritual groups was heard. Some of them received a questionnaire whose methods of analysis are unknown. In particular, the focus of many interventions on the Jehovah’s Witnesses is perplexing.

The personalities heard are for the most part won over to a discourse fully justifying the fight against “dérives sectaires” considered as a veritable social scourge.

Among the bodies heard, there are:

the MIVILUDES, UNADFI, the CCMM,

• a set of bodies for the defence of childhood and of victims which for the most part delegate “cult” questions to UNADFI and the CCMM,

• a certain number of ministries such as National Education, Health, which work in close collaboration with the MIVILUDES, UNADFI and the CCMM,

• a certain number of health experts,

• former adherents of spiritual minorities,

• jurists,

• foreign representatives

One will note the absence of sociologists, of historians of religion and of ethnologists.

The close collaboration of many people within the framework of the MIVILUDES has in many respects obstructed the opening of the debates and the circulation of alternative information.

The intervention of Didier Leschi, head of the Central Bureau of Religious Affairs at the Ministry of the Interior, deserves to be mentioned as being potentially of a nature to balance a partial and biased debate. A certain number of other participants likewise managed to make fairly measured remarks, often badly received by the commission.

The proofs of the cult danger — an alleged social scourge for minors — in the form of scientific, statistical, cross-checked surveys verifiable by independent third parties, are non-existent or in any case not referenced during the hearings.

The figures provided during the hearings are approximate and their interpretation haphazard, indeed insufficient, when they do not simply denote the non-existent character of this social problem.

The ignorance of spiritual minorities is flagrant. Many remarks feed a conflation between spirituality and criminality. The same conflations are practised concerning alternative health approaches. An association such as UNADFI, the relay for many other associations on the question of cults, cannot claim sufficient sociological, legal, belief-appraising or theological competence. Its de facto “monopoly” on information, by virtue of the public-utility status it has obtained, the recommendation it receives from the government by way of decrees and circulars and the means at its disposal thanks to the State’s subsidies, prevents a democratic debate which must today be re-established by the public authorities.

Many participants from the public authorities applied themselves to saying that they respect laïcité, claiming not to judge beliefs. On many occasions, however, value judgements were passed on doctrines. Do certain remarks by deputies, defamatory in nature and resembling an offence of membership, have their place within a parliamentary commission, all the more so when the hearings are public and no right of reply is offered to the defamed groups?

As things stand, the only result of this commission is to recognise the irrelevance of a procedure oriented in its conclusions and insufficient in its methods of inquiry.

This commission demonstrates the refusal of our Parliament to engage in a genuine approach of balanced knowledge on a social subject of the first importance: the place of spiritual minorities in French society.

The CICNS will follow with attention the results produced by this commission and will not fail to comment on them without evasion for all the audiences at its disposal.

Note:

The quotations and extracts are in dark blue,

the CICNS’s commentary in light blue.

Jean-Michel Roulet: Hearing of 12 July 2006

Commentary and selected extracts

Jean-Michel Roulet is president of the MIVILUDES (Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and the Fight against Dérives Sectaires), a mission attached to the Prime Minister.

M. Roulet’s hearing is correctly summed up by M. Fenech, president of the commission: “You have drawn a dark picture of the state of minors caught up in cult movements as regards education, as regards health also; you speak to us also of certain deaths of minors in cults”. M. Roulet’s picture is indeed dark: “One may say … today, that children, minors, are safe at no point of the territory (…) our children are exposed to a risk, a risk we do not understand, a risk we do not control (…)”, and there is no doubt that a European foreigner listening to this hearing would not fail to be struck by the French situation, both by its gravity and certainly by its incongruity, since the said “cults” exist in other European countries without necessarily being presented as a social scourge. The alleged existence of this scourge, as well as its treatment, are a French specificity.

M. Roulet’s remarks are in line with the MIVILUDES’s 2005 report. The gravity of the situation is hammered into people’s minds there (may one speak of manipulation?) but no evidence, no proof is provided. It seems that the MIVILUDES applies a precautionary principle pushed to the extreme, on the one hand by casting suspicion on all spiritual and alternative minorities by taxing them with “dérives sectaires”, on the other by “victimising” this target population. In both cases, a whole fringe of the population is discredited. M. Roulet specifies that a single “victim” would suffice to justify the MIVILUDES’s current action (“in any case, were there but one, that is one too many”); this preoccupation with the fate of victims would be laudable if it did not neglect with such indifference the collateral effects of the policy pursued.

We also note, in his remarks, the imposed exercise of maintaining a strictly secular packaging in order to express opinions which otherwise would not be in conformity with the 1905 Act. M. Roulet does not speak of “cults” but of “dérives sectaires”. Let us remark at the same time how immoderate is the commission’s use of the term “cult”.

M. Roulet declares: “The risks of dérives sectaires never lie in the beliefs, rarely in the doctrine, they always lie in the men”

. If such were the case there would be no anti-cult law in France (About-Picard Act) directed against spiritual minorities. One would not say: M. X, a member of the cult, has committed an offence, but simply M. X has committed an offence.

The evocation of doctrine is always the backdrop to the remarks: M. Roulet, for example, brushes aside with a swift wave of the hand the facts demonstrating that the Jehovah’s Witnesses respect republican teaching, explaining, in a very slanted manner as regards form, how Darwinism is called into question by the doctrine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (the word doctrine is of course not pronounced). M. Fenech will take care to specify at the end of the hearing: “I thank you also on behalf of the commission for having indeed recalled that it is not for you, nor for us moreover, to issue the slightest value judgement on this or that movement, belief, and that we are here to examine what falls under republican law with regard to the dangers incurred by children and minors; I believe it was important that you should specify it”.

France has not yet agreed to look squarely at the reality of its spiritual landscape, which supposes recognising in it the positive elements as much as the possibly problematic ones. This refusal is expressed through the creation of bodies such as the MIVILUDES, presented as a body of vigilance, but in fact above all of struggle and of denunciation. The MIVILUDES fights, since such is its object, but when the material comes to be lacking, one can create it.

JMRoulet: ”(…) Cult organisations, generally speaking, cult movements, the gurus who animate them, are not by nature very courageous people who seek risk. So they will, when they can, turn towards people who are in a state of momentary or more lasting weakness (…)”

The so-called cult organisations today designate without discernment almost the whole of alternative spiritual approaches. It is a reality which, since the 1995 report, cannot be ignored. Knowing this, these words are accusatory towards a majority of sincere and honest people.

(…)

JMRoulet: ”(…) schooling in our country still leaves aside about 6,000 children who are not in the normal circuit (…)”

The “normal” circuit is made up of secular schools and schools under contract. Yet the Constitutional Council (of 23 November 1977) specifies that freedom of teaching is a fundamental principle recognised by the laws of the Republic.

(…)

PVuilque: ”(…) The MIVILUDES reports for the year some forty judicial investigations relating to movements committing or having committed dérives sectaires (…)”

JM Roulet: ”(…) in the cases which are mentioned, the percentage of children must be of the order of about 1/3 children, 2/3 adults. Why this percentage when I have drawn a fairly black picture of the situation? Well, first because acts of violence done to children within cult movements are not always known, and are even very rarely known. They are known only when the parents do not themselves belong to that movement, for otherwise the parents are not going to denounce something to which they adhere totally. And when the children, having reached adulthood, will perhaps have managed to get out of that hold, they will not necessarily want to denounce the facts either, and that is why acts of violence done to minors, both on the physical and on the mental plane, are very little known and rarely come to the knowledge of the courts”

It is suggested that belonging to a group or a movement, and not the doctrine, would engender the violence. If such is the case, why does one speak of cults? All groups may be said to generate violence. One could then say that life in society engenders dérives sectaires, that families are cults, since violence towards minors is present there.

JMRoulet: ”(…) the courts do not always consider as a dérive sectaire the facts which are reported; a certain number of facts which are reported and which are in reality ordinary-law offences but which are committed in the framework of a dérive sectaire are doubtless not counted as such in the statistics (…)”

The recurrent problem of the anti-cult struggle is the absence of cases. It is explained by saying that the courts have no knowledge of these cases. One then looks for a qualifier for ordinary law in order to increase the statistic. If one applies the criteria of dérives sectaires proposed by the MIVILUDES, most offences committed in any situation whatever could be called “cultic”. This notion therefore has no legal pertinence. The most natural hypothesis is thus never mentioned: there is no significant delinquency in spiritual minorities.

PVuilque: ”(…) Excuse me for interrupting you. Do you consider that there is on the part of magistrates in particular a certain reticence to broach this phenomenon, or a lack of information? (…)”

JMRoulet: ”(…) The About-Picard Act has not yet been exploited as it could be and there, I believe it is necessary to complete the training (…) That is to say, when an offence which I shall qualify as ordinary-law is established, such as rape, incest, absence of care, etc. … the investigating magistrate or the trial court will consider that there are sufficient elements established for an offence to be characterised and for the person who has made herself guilty of it to be prosecuted and punished as the penal code provides, and they say to themselves that from there, it is perhaps not necessary to establish the phenomenon of mental hold, for that can complicate things, that can create avenues of appeal, that can be awkward for the victim herself who does not wish to see it raised that she was under a mental hold, and from the moment ordinary law suffices, what is the good of complicating one’s task (…)”

Massimo Introvigne of CESNUR, in the conference presenting his book “Brainwashing: myth or reality” at l’Harmattan (see our video), reminds us of the countries which have an anti-cult law on mental manipulation: an article of the penal code in Spain, the French About-Picard Act, a bill in Belgium (copied from the French law), a law which has not yet seen the light of day in Chile, and China which modelled its law on the French law following a visit by Alain Vivien to Beijing. If one removes the non-democratic countries from this list, the commissions of the non-francophone countries have in their majority advised against legislating on this subject. The theories of mental manipulation were invalidated in the framework of a trial in the United States following the “Fishman” ruling, and this for trials involving spiritual minorities.

(…)

Christian Decocq: ”(…) And I would very much like you to go deeper, if you are in a position to do so, into what fundamentally are the defences of Anglo-Saxon society, legal defences, in relation to the same phenomenon, for we are all the same, we who want to give lessons in democracy to the whole world, we have none to receive from the Anglo-Saxons (…)”

JMRoulet: ”(…) The ministry of foreign affairs very often tells us: but our position earns us such and such a remark, so we receive Mme Jahangir who represents, I believe, the UN and who comes to see whether in France religious freedoms are properly respected, we receive M. Y who comes to see how things are in the prisons, etc, etc. But transparency does not bother us at all. What must then be seen is the nature of the criticism. One must see whether the criticism is founded or whether the criticism is not founded; what must also be seen is whether the arguments stated are the rapporteur’s arguments, or whether on the contrary, in a concern to make the work easier, some arguments of NGOs are taken up which in fact are the false noses of cult organisations (…)”

The French arrogance often mentioned abroad can no doubt be measured only when one has lived there. France stands as an exception in matters of the fight against cults. A certain number of French academics, specialists in religions, think that the situation is so blocked that the solution will come from Europe. We encourage our deputies to listen to their European counterparts on these questions.

It is astonishing that M. Roulet is not sure that Mme Jahangir represents the UN. It is apparently a way of ignoring this rapporteur’s mission and her remarks on the treatment of spiritual minorities in France (her report came out at the very moment when the French deputies were launching a preparatory meeting for this new commission): “The policy followed and the measures adopted by the French authorities have provoked situations in which the right to freedom of religion or belief of members of these groups has been unduly restricted. Moreover, the public condemnation of certain of these groups as well as the stigmatisation of their members have resulted in certain forms of discrimination, notably with regard to their children”.

If it were not sufficient to consider Asma Jahangir’s remarks as unfounded, they are immediately discredited by suspecting them of having been inspired by “cults”.

JM Roulet: ”(…) secular France with its 1905 law recognises, by recognising none, all religions, all beliefs, because it forbids none; that is to say that for France, for French-style laïcité, freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of worship is something that is not up for discussion, it is an inalienable acquisition, and instead of bringing us onto this ground by saying, when you fight cults you are fighting the new religious movements, I would like to know where the new religious movements are …among the people, among the families who introduce the notion of induced false memories to demolish families. I would like to know, in instinctotherapy feeding, where is the “new religious movement” side? (…)”

M. Roulet does not want to recognise that spiritual minorities are included within the framework of the fight against dérives sectaires. This assertion is dismaying. The notion of “cult” has effectively been extended to alternative health approaches. Does that mean that spiritual minorities are no longer stigmatised as “cults”?

The statement of the 1905 Act seems to be a rhetorical exercise, a smokescreen, for the spirit of this law is not respected in France as regards spiritual minorities.

PVuilque: ”(…) let us imagine that tomorrow, whatever the government, it is considered that this fight against cult organisations is no longer topical (…) Let us also imagine the case where, in a government whatever it may be, there are wills to fight a little less… less effectively than today (…) Well, notably in relation to what is happening in Belgium, in relation to what is happening in other countries. So I know the question is not easy since you are directly dependent, and President of the interministerial mission, but what vision of things, in relation to this European situation, do you have of your organisation’s effectiveness in institutional terms? (…)”

JMRoulet: ”(…) As I was saying a moment ago, Monsieur le député, it is true that the French model is a unique model there too (…) the CIAOSM, unlike the MIVILUDES, issues opinions; well, to issue opinions, what would we have to do in France? The MIVILUDES would have to become, for example, an independent administrative authority as the CSA is (…) I believe that whatever the administrative packaging, that is not of great importance; what is important is the political will to do something (…)”

M. Vuilque’s hypothesis must be analysed. What responsible government could fail to continue the fight against dérives sectaires if it is justified? To suppose that this new government would not be responsible on the subject of a veritable social scourge is scarcely credible… There remains therefore the hypothesis that the unreality of the social scourge is recognised.

If there is no difference in France between a body of struggle and a body which gives opinions, it is because the question of spiritual minorities has been approached only from the angle of struggle. It is today necessary to create an independent observatory of spirituality in France. It is without any doubt the most pertinent initiative the next government could take.

Emmanuel Jancovici: Hearing of 12 July 2006

Commentary and selected extracts:

Emmanuel Jancovici is chargé de mission on dérives sectaires at the ministry of health and solidarity. His remarks illustrate the insufficiency of anti-cult argumentation. M. Jancovici himself acknowledges the non-scientific character of his work, but that does not prevent him throughout his hearing from extending to the whole group of Jehovah’s Witnesses information gathered through a survey of some twenty former adherents. This non-scientific and non-deontological approach renders void the conclusions of such a survey.

In many respects, this commission also resembles a chamber of indictment against the group of Jehovah’s Witnesses — even if other groups are mentioned — who will not have had the opportunity to be heard, which would have been the least one could expect in a democratic debate.

At the end of his hearing M. Jancovici declares: ”(…) The difficulty we have and that we have in all cult affairs is that we have very few complaints (…)”. The proper business of an inquiry is to make hypotheses, as open as possible, in order to arrive at a little truth. One hypothesis is never mentioned: the complaints do not exist because people in the great majority have no reason to complain; their experience in a spiritual group is part of their life’s path, like other experiences. This incapacity to envisage the benefits of an experience within a spiritual minority is downright distressing.

EJancovici: ”(…) If one takes only the group of Jehovah’s Witnesses, one may estimate today that at minimum 45,000 children have parents living in this context (…) There must be several tens of thousands of children, I would say between 30 and 40,000, who belong to other groups; I think we are between sixty, and at the lowest, between sixty and eighty thousand children today raised in a cult context. Out of prudence I say, because you know that we have very few statistics and including the work of the RG does not allow us to evaluate the exact figure of children concerned, out of prudence I say in any case that several tens of thousands of children, which shows that it is a considerable figure, which goes beyond the children living in community; we have several tens of thousands of children living in this context (…)”

There would therefore be between 60,000 and 80,000 children raised in a cult context, in potential danger, according to M. Jancovici. The fact of implying that the danger is generalised is characteristic of the conflations practised for some twenty years about spiritual minorities. The figure of 80,000 will become 100,000 half an hour later, by incorporating into the dangerous groups the fundamentalist groups, with no further precision. One of the objectives, deliberate or not, of these announcements is to feed among the public the fear of spiritual minorities on a particularly sensitive subject: that of children.

EJancovici: ”(…) We proceeded in a particular manner, we investigated for nearly two years among a group of some twenty young ex-adherents having belonged to the same group, the group of Jehovah’s Witnesses (…) with moreover the support of uncontested specialists in questions of child protection (…) We also, although having worked principally on this group, starting from the ADFI of the Nord, we also tried to have other elements of knowledge on other minors having lived, well, other young adults having lived in other groups, so as to compare the data we were able to gather (…) I must say, and out of a concern for honesty, that the work we arrived at and which should give the occasion in the coming months for a working guide intended for child-protection professionals (…) the work therefore which preceded the creation of this guide does not claim, I think it must be emphasised, to describe a group scientifically, in particular the group of Jehovah’s Witnesses, nor to give elements on the foreseeable future of the children who are in it (…)”

M. Jancovici declares that his work has no scientific value. We are astonished that “uncontested specialists in questions of child protection” could have allowed the assertions and generalisations made during the interview to be published (unless they are endorsed by those specialists).

M. Jancovici, throughout his hearing, specifies that he is not speaking of the influence of doctrine but of membership of the group. As for M. Roulet, this resembles an obligatory discourse: the secular State cannot pass judgement on doctrine. M. Jancovici will nevertheless several times evoke the theme of “Satan” as gravely penalising the adherents of the Jehovah’s Witnesses: “The general framework is carried by the doctrine which has anguishing, terrorising effects on all the children and adults who find themselves in this type of group …. terrorising in the very sense that, if you like, the doctrine posits that we live in a universe, I was going to say, where Satan is omnipresent.”

We reproduce below some generalisations made by M. Jancovici on the basis of the testimonies of 20 former young adherents out of 45,000 (if one accepts the estimate provided).

EJancovici: (…) The children watch the parents in case they should not respect the internal regulations. (…) The adherents in their totality forbid themselves a whole series of things, but without the group itself telling them, no, that, that is not permitted (…) One finds oneself, and it is very impressive, (…) faced with young people who can no longer be alive (…) Another element to be taken into account in which these children are going to be caught: all the money, all the energy of the adherents is diverted for the group (…) There are groups which advocate incest, but they are in the minority, I am not going into…, in the collection we made (…) four young people had been victims of sexual assault, eh, I mean, which is considerable, since it is a group constituted in a random manner even if it is a group constituted by victims of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I asked the question whether to their knowledge these situations were fairly frequent. It was indicated to me…, it was indicated to me, that situations of sexual assault, I have no possibility of verifying, are frequent in this group. (…) There must exist a very strong tension in this group between the closure of the group on the one hand and sexual repression (…) In particular the adults told me that there is a control of intimacy such that within couples, the couples for the most part no longer have a sexual life (…)

EJancovici: (…) In this context we were concerned not to sink into victimology in the very sense that in a system of this order, there are people who have more flexibility (…)

One can hardly imagine what M. Jancovici’s remarks might have been had he “sunk” into victimology! He recognises, not that certain people might fulfil themselves in the group — that seems unimaginable — but that they have enough “flexibility” to accept the group’s pressure.

(…)

G Fenech: ”(…) I do not think you were sufficiently precise on a point which seems to me important (…) Are you telling us that in order to obtain approval from the DASS, must a childminder — must you look into whether she does not have a membership of a cult group or community? Is that possible under republican law, do you have a vigilance on that? (…)”

EJancovici: ”(…) The whole problematic developed by the administrative courts in particular and the Conseil d’État is that one cannot in France take a decision of any kind on the sole ground of membership (…) One must from this point of view, I was going to say, start from the membership, eh, I mean, and ask oneself whether possibly, given this membership, the person applying to benefit from this status has a mode of practice which is in conformity with the practices of the field in which she wishes to work (…)”

Without being named as such, what is at issue there is an offence of membership, a notion which appears on many occasions during the hearings. M. Jancovici’s nuance is, moreover, interesting. One cannot take a decision on membership alone, but one takes this membership into account as a starting point. We invite the reader to read Mme Lebatard’s reply (both are members of the MIVILUDES) to a similar question put by Mme Adam.

(…)

Jacques Myard: ”(…) Sir, you alluded to two cults, one of which had already been in the news in the past, that is la Citadelle, and the other which I did not know because indeed they are swarming, Tabitha’s place, is that it? (…) Now what you said about the closed system and notably about the quasi brainwashing of the group (…), it is a phenomenon well known to all totalitarianisms (…) either in the concentration camps, or in dictatorial systems of the Nazi, communist type etc (…) That, that has been studied (…) have you got closer, one might say for example, straight out to the military who know what they are talking about in that field? (…) (…) The guru is a fellow who had interests in Japan, no? (…)”

The term “swarming” gives a fairly precise image of the way M. Myard considers the groups mentioned. This vision is certainly not isolated and is due in part to the drawing up of lists of dangerous movements, lists which, ten years later, and despite the strictly indicative character of these reports from the legal point of view, are still used as reliable sources. One measures there the inconsequence of describing these reports as “indicative” when the rumour of dangerousness has not ceased.

The evocation of Nazism and communism in this context and for the groups concerned is not serious, but it is nevertheless consistent with the maintenance of the psychosis. It is true that the modern theory of mental manipulation was elaborated to explain Nazism and then communism. We recommend reading the book by Massimo Introvigne and Dick Anthony “Brainwashing: myth or reality” at l’Harmattan, which shows the invalidation of this notion both scientifically and before the American courts within the framework of the anti-cult struggle.

As for the reference to the military as specialists in brainwashing, it is interesting in more than one respect after the About-Picard Act was voted to penalise cult groups guilty of mental manipulation.

(…)

EJancovici: (…) Curious as it may seem, some retain an ideal of the cult (…) You have adherents who do what are called cult tours: I have met a cult, this one does not suit me, I am going to another group (…) There is suffering in needing, whatever negative one has lived through, to go and find another group. (…) Adherents leaving cults do not immediately rush towards the associations (…)

One finds there again the refusal to conceive of a spiritual approach in a minority group as constructive and beneficial for the individual.

(…)

EJancovici: (…) The difficulty we have with the Jehovah’s Witnesses is that fundamentally in particular, it is a group which plays on a very voluntarist aspect that I would call…, they are people who are clean-cut (…) in particular the proximity to Catholicism plays a part in this effect (…) so it is very difficult, just like that, to tell oneself that in a group which is close to us, that actions, well, that paedophilic practices or sexual assaults can develop, and moreover (…) What I am indicating did not target the Jehovah’s Witnesses as such but aimed to explore situations when children may find themselves in systems of this type (…) It does not aim to trigger a judicial investigation against the Jehovah’s Witnesses but to understand in what contextual element children and adults may find themselves (…)

M. Jancovici has apparently not heard of the morals problems encountered in the Catholic Church, to imagine them only among minority groups. The link between paedophilia and spiritual approach is however a common practice: it aims to discredit the spiritual approach by making it responsible for the deviances of certain individuals.

How could the Jehovah’s Witnesses not feel targeted by M. Jancovici’s remarks?… If the conflations stated by M. Jancovici were founded, resting on a complete inquiry, they would assuredly justify legal action; in the absence of these elements of proof, are these remarks admissible on the part of a State official and at a public hearing?

Chantal Lebatard: Hearing of 5 September 2006

Commentary and selected extracts:

Chantal Lebatard is head of the “Sociology, psychology and family law” department of the Union Nationale des Associations Familiales (UNAF). Mme Lebatard recalls in her preamble that it was with the support of UNAF that the ADFIs (Associations de Défense de la Famille et des Individus) were formed. She is a member of the MIVILUDES’s Steering Council.

Mme Lebatard’s general position on dérives sectaires joins the classic discourse of the real danger that spiritual minorities represent in French society. Her presentation will however remain very general; Jacques Myard challenges her on this point:

”(…) Madam, we have listened to you with much interest, but allow me to have found you a little theoretical, abstract, because we here are people of the concrete, we want cases (…)”. Her reply will be: ”(…) your accusation of theory, it is inherent to my function and to the place from which I speak; I am at the national level of an organisation which is broken down at departmental level (…) so I do not have the field approach which means that cases come up to us (…); moreover, UNAF, the UDAFs and the associations are not directly engaged with the crises, (…) that is not quite how we function, all the more so as within our body we have the ADFI (…) logic requires that we entrust the difficulties to those who know how to handle them (…) And I found myself very embarrassed when I actually wanted to construct this presentation, because, belonging to the Steering Council of the MIVILUDES, what could I tell you that was different when I subscribe to the annual report which has just been circulated and when I have knowledge of all this information also through that source?”.

It is worrying to see that a commission which ought to widen its spectrum of information, all the more so as the number of hearings is restricted, feeds itself with its own information (M. Fenech and Brard are also members of the MIVILUDES’s Steering Council). The same remark applies to UNAF’s sources of information, which rests exclusively on the ADFI and therefore obtains partial (not to say biased) information about reality, Mme Picard, president of UNADFI, also being a member of the MIVILUDES’s Steering Council.

Mme Lebatard evokes in her presentation the different ways in which a child may be involved in dérives sectaires: the child as a means of seducing the parents, the child raised from the start in a cult, the child drawn into a cult. Again, these remarks are theoretical; “cults”, in an abstract way, are accused — that is to say all the groups which indiscriminately bear this appellation which, let us recall, has no legal definition and has lost its sociological meaning.

Despite this proximity to anti-cult theses, Mme Lebatard will have a balanced discourse on a certain number of subjects and will highlight the difficulty of appraising situations which cannot be satisfied with simplifying answers.

CLebatard: (…) One has the impression that our society has a hypersensitivity on these questions which touch on childhood (…) with, curiously and paradoxically at the same time, the impression of an increase in ill-treatment, of an increase in the number of children at risk, in danger, or really ill-treated, of an increase in the malaise of young people and in adolescent suicide attempts, of an increase in the delinquency of minors even when one describes it sometimes as incivility, sometimes as real delinquency (…) as if our society which attaches such value to childhood produced at the same time and paradoxically, not the beneficence which is necessary to that childhood but on the contrary suffering and anguish (…)”

This remark reveals the incongruity of this commission of inquiry which, far from tackling a problem of scale, attempts to divert attention onto spiritual minorities. No data makes it possible to say that the ill-treatment of children is greater in spiritual minorities than elsewhere; it is moreover quite probable, according to our sources, that it is lower. This trompe-l’œil gaze is symptomatic of a society which does not dare to look at itself and seeks scapegoats.

(…)

CLebatard: “Should one imagine a legislative arsenal specific to the case of child victims? It seems to us that there one arrives at the difficult and delicate work of discernment and I am not sure that we need new laws or new mechanisms (…) We certainly know what is harmful or little favourable to a harmonious development but we do not always know how to evaluate all the consequences of what may happen and we do not know how the work of reconstruction or resilience is done which makes it possible to overcome after-effects or deep wounds (…) There is there all this difficulty of approaching the suffering of the child confronted with ill-treatment, which is not specific to the ill-treatment of cults, which is really the tragedy of the child who has been deprived of childhood or who has suffered in his childhood”.

CLebatard: “I recall that the primary responsibility for the education of children is an element of parental authority and it is therefore the parents who must transmit first to their child what they think fundamental and essential for his construction (…) Parents do not transmit ideas, they transmit ways of being, they transmit being, and that, no one can do in their place (…) And among the values that parents transmit very naturally are placed those which give meaning to their life (…) whether they are founded or not on a religious faith and membership of a community of believers (…) The child’s right to his religious freedom which is inscribed in the CIDE [editor’s note: International Convention on the Rights of the Child] fits into this tension and one sees clearly that any intervention by a third party in particular to evaluate where freedom begins and where the loss of freedom is situated becomes delicate.”

(…)

Christian Vanneste: ”(…) in the preceding decades, there was an impressive increase in the number of suicides among adolescents, I think it is the second cause of mortality (…) Do you have very precise information on the consequences of the domination of a young mind by a cult on the evolution of suicide; (…) does it reinforce the social bond and therefore does it avoid suicide, or on the contrary does it destabilise further and increase the risk of suicide (…)?”

CLebatard: ”(…) All that one knows is that there is indeed a fascination at those ages, a fascination with death, and that this fascination with death and with risk can be combated by strong elements and that the appeal to the reassurance of someone who presents himself bringing apparently firm or solid answers (…) is sometimes enough to counterbalance this difficulty.”

(…)

Philippe Tourtelier: ”(…) When you alert families to being vigilant in relation to a certain number of services which are offered to them (…) you said the ADFI gives lists and points of reference; the lists one knows about because there there are facts, people identified etc, but can you give us points which would make it possible to identify the risk in the bodies which offer services (…)?”

CLebatard: “Oh dear, I am not sure I can answer this question to your satisfaction (…) When one has told parents to be careful, one has not told them “do not go there”. I mean that there is also the freedom of one person or another to find in the offers that are made answers to needs which are not satisfied elsewhere (…)”

(…)

JPBrard: ”(…) What is UNAF’s position (…) when only blood transfusion can save the person, must priority be given to belief and above all when it is a matter of children (…)?”

CLebatard: “Well, I believe that the legislation has already answered on that point and that doctors have perfectly the right to intervene (…)”

JPBrard: ”(…) What is your personal feeling, Mme Lebatard?”

CLebatard: ”(…) Honestly I do not know (…) Confronted with reality in a personal choice of one of my relatives or another, I do not know how I would react, probably with my heart and on that day with something that would happen and that I would have to assume afterwards, so I am not in a position to give you a theoretical position. I think one must be very prudent in such cases and not state rules that are too strict which would be as alienating as the freedom or the right to save people that one is trying to preserve.”

GFenech: “Perhaps to bring a precision of a jurisprudential order (…): the Conseil d’État in an interim order of 2002 gave precedence to the medical decision over the refusal of blood transfusion by the parents. A case law which, for children, is not only common sense, but is of application and of law”

(…)

Philippe Vitel: ”(…) You are a member of the MIVILUDES; I have read the 2005 report attentively; and the report questions today the validity of the accreditation procedures conducted by National Education with regard to (…) alternative or parallel educational structures (…); do these procedures seem to you appropriate (…)?”

CLebatard: ”(…) I would want to answer you, to my mind no, but that is because National Education has failed in its… I would say in its mission of being also a laboratory and a place for the elaboration of new pedagogies (…). We have shut ourselves into functionings that are too rigid which as a result obviously leave room for all pedagogical innovation outside (…)”

(…)

Madame Adam: ”(…) You spoke of support for parenting, of prevention (…) you spoke by that fact also of the importance of social workers in the advice which is given to families (…). We have had knowledge of troubling but unproven facts of social workers themselves perhaps being part of cults; obviously that must exist (…) Do you think that current legislation is sufficient in terms of employment law if it is proved that these people are part of a cult — that is to say, I say things very clearly, I think that if one is part of a cult, one can no longer exercise that profession?”

CLebatard: ”(…) If there is no breach of deontology and if there is constructive and effective work for the family’s well-being, there is no reason to set aside one person or another on the ground of any membership whatever.”

One finds here again the “offence of membership”. Mme Lebatard’s reply to Mme Adam goes without saying, but the question, put by a deputy who is a guarantor of the Republic’s values, leaves one perplexed.

Daniel Groscolas, hearing of Tuesday 5 September 2006

Commentary and selected extracts:

Monsieur Daniel Groscolas is president of the centre for documentation and education against mental manipulation (CCMM), former Inspector General of National Education, Inspecteur d’Académie from 1990 to 2003. Member of the MIVILUDES’s steering council.

When M. Groscolas “refuses to enter into theological debate”, it is not out of respect for beliefs but out of a profound contempt for them and a total rejection, as his attitude towards all the groups he speaks of shows.

M. Groscolas considers “the cult phenomenon” as a shameful disease of which the Republic must be rid, with great reinforcements of laws, of decrees and of “forceful action”, in the manner of a Robespierre of whom Mirabeau said, in 1789: “This man is dangerous, he believes everything he says”. As he says himself, he does not go in for dialogue and gentleness and recounts his exploits to us like a hunter lying in wait for his prey (“my target”) whose sole objective is to hang trophies in the museum of his memory. He fantasises about the extermination of the “cult” species in all its incarnations and deplores the lack of resources. He takes us round his gallery like a man of times past who has brought his work of destruction to a successful conclusion (“99% of it”), and we watch with sadness the skeletons of the vanished specimens file past: all those men, those women, those children who have tried, against all odds, to live according to their conscience and not according to norms imposed by a society which denies the spiritual dimension of man, all the richness and diversity of educational, social experiments, where conflicts and delinquency are rarer than anywhere else, where creativity grows giant vegetables and feeds everyone for a minimal outlay, where the spirit of enterprise develops solutions which respect nature, the environment and the human being, where children are happy as numerous sociological studies attest, where fraternity, sharing and mutual aid give adults back a taste for common life — those small groups one sees flourishing in many countries other than France and which here are outlaws, pariahs, madmen to be locked up, terrorists to be shot down.

As Christiane Singer puts it so well: “It is so grotesque to fire shells at sparrows that were pecking away happily… It is monstrous.”

Daniel Groscolas: The study of the cult phenomenon over 10 years — 1996, the parliamentary report made public, “Cults in France” — is revealing of important developments and of changes of strategy on the part of the cults. That is why I think your commission comes just at the right moment. (…) The great international cults subsist but have changed strategies and at the same time, one is witnessing a multiplication of microstructures. Ten years ago (…) I was inspector general of the Ministry of National Education, and following the parliamentary report, the minister in office (…) asked the question: “In your view, is National Education concerned by the phenomenon of cults?” (…) and I received the mission of making a study over 6 months on: “Are the cults concerned by National Education?”. Following my report in August 1996, I was charged with creating a specialised unit within the ministry of National Education, a unit which I directed until my retirement. And then (…) the Centre Against Mental Manipulation offered me the presidency, which I accepted. (…) The CCMM, since its creation, affirms its attachment to a certain number of values: laïcité, freedom of conscience and religious freedom, human rights and the rights of the child (…) and because we are secular, we sometimes approach the cult problem with a different outlook from other organisations. We refuse to enter into theological debate, because we consider that religious freedom is a fundamental freedom and that to interfere in theological debate is to take an unbelievable risk and, at the limit, to set oneself in opposition to freedom of choice, to freedom of conscience.

M. Groscolas defends freedom of conscience but, as he will say further on, recognises no one’s right to experiment with a way of life at the margins of the values he conceives as the only valid ones.

(…) Twenty-five years ago, the public authorities did not take the cult phenomenon into account at all, and until the parliamentary report, one may say, of 1995, the public authorities felt little concerned by the phenomenon of cults (…). (…) The legislation on what is called compulsory schooling, the Jules Ferry-Gobelet legislation, 1882-1886, resting on a decree of Year 2 which proclaims the principle of freedom of teaching, organises the school system but affirms that schools may exist freely and that the inspection corps, 1886 text, must ensure only hygiene, morality and safety. Now these texts were still valid until 1998, and so just before 1998 several structures pertaining to Scientology in particular were identified (…) For National Education, by “the principle of freedom of teaching”, they had the right to do what they wanted and we had no right to inspect. And then came (…) a stage in my eyes entirely fundamental which was the drafting of a legislative text which modifies the Ferry-Gobelet legislation, a text of parliamentary initiative (…). The law adopted unanimously by both Assemblies — I drafted the implementing decree, which is to say that I know all this machinery well. And what was extraordinary is that, in the months which followed the publication of the decree, schools which we suspected of being of a cult character dissolved themselves before the law came into application.

The 1998 law was specially drafted against the said cults and as M. Bourg-Broc pointed out during the deliberations on the law: “What will be the consequences of article 1A on these children? If one considers that there is an obligation of means for public and private education under contract and an obligation of result for private education outside contract or family education, it is a treatment that is inequitable to say the least.”

DGroscolas: “I must say that that was a considerable surprise, that is to say that the organisers of these schools knew they were in breach of the law. So an entirely effective parliamentary initiative, and one may say that when I left my functions (…), only one site was still known in France where there were children schooled in cult conditions, (…) this organisation is called Tabhita’s Place, situated in the Pyrénées Atlantiques, in a small village called Sus. The minister of the time was called (…) François Bayrou, and he was president of the Conseil Général when a child died in this cult, and as minister of National Education he asked me to intervene and it was the first burning file of this death of a child in a cult. (…)”

In the passage which follows, M. Groscolas indicates that he was led to meet the incriminated groups only from December 1998, within the framework of the law on the reinforcement of compulsory schooling. That means that during the six-month inquiry he carried out in the first half of 1996 to know whether “National Education was concerned by the cults”, and which was at the origin of this law, he consulted none of the movements listed in the parliamentary report. Nor during the two following years when he was charged with creating and directing within the ministry of National Education the “Unit for the prevention of cult phenomena in education”. One better understands this sentence: “It is all the same the opposite of the images one has” and why he needs to justify his line of conduct by this paradoxical argument: we excluded you from society like lepers because your ideas do not suit us and because they risked spreading, and now we accuse you of being outside society so that we will be able to “make your life a misery” and prevent you from living according to your beliefs. Where intelligence would require, as the Assembly of the Council of Europe recommends, that the people concerned be consulted to know what they think of it, M. Groscolas decides that he is more aware than others of what is good for them and that a line of conduct must be imposed on them to save them, and their children, from the heresy which endangers society — under cover, of course, of human rights and freedom of conscience.

DGroscolas: “I do not know whether it is a piece of luck but thanks to the law of 18 December 1998, I went to every known site in France of a cult character. And the law authorising it, I was therefore able to see how it functioned: I went to Horus, I went… Now it is all the same the opposite of the images one has. Tabhita’s Place — one does not see unhappy children. They are children in good health, it is an agrarian cult. But conversely, because the mental conditioning is less visible, they are children who are totally disconnected from all social life, and that obviously raises grave questions which are those raised by the Horus cult where there are almost no more children: young people who have lived their whole childhood in such a structure, tomorrow when the structure disappears, are future adults who are entirely unfitted for life in society, they do not know the slightest rule. So the Republic, the republican State, must remedy that. (…) Just before I retired, the courts had been seised because the cult refused the schooling of the children; a court measure was taken. When the educators came to fetch the children for family placement, the children had crossed into Spain, into a subsidiary of the cult which is on the other side of the Pyrenees. Which shows that things are not so easy as one might believe.

National education (…), a year or two ago, was contemplating declaring a school within the cult. Several of us protested, saying: “That is not going to be an opening onto life”. And so now, National Education is working to compel the cult to send the children to the village school, which is the right solution. That is to say that the children, gaining access to social life, will discover other ways of life. (…) Here, in this Assembly, when the law of 18 December [1998] was voted (…) with several parliamentarians, we were happy that the law was voted unanimously and was going to give us means of intervening. (…) Before the vote on the law, all the studies, all the rectorates, all the academic inspectorates questioned led to this approximate figure of the order of 6,000 children in France who were concerned by the cult phenomenon on the school plane. At the present time (…), only Tabhita’s Place is known, so it is at most some forty children, plus individual cases difficult to discern.

The difficulty, for the drafting of the law (…)… is Condorcet’s thought in the field of education. Condorcet considered that in a democracy, freedom of teaching was needed. That if it were a system for controlling education in a country, there was a risk of dirigisme and of a will to manipulate. And a decree of Year 2 not revoked still has force of law, and it is — alas France is shaken by “secular school”/“private school” crises, and so on — this decree of Year 2 reappears and has force of law. I could detail for you the case law resting on it.”

It is regrettable that our parliamentarians see in Condorcet’s thought an obstacle instead of the inspiration it breathed into that famous decree of Year 2, fairly well summed up in this sentence: “If instruction must become public, education, on the other hand, must remain private. Public instruction admits no religious worship, certainly, but that means plainly that the State must leave particular beliefs their fullest freedom in private”.

DGroscolas: “So it was a matter, when you adopted the law, of not contravening this principle of freedom. (…) The law, but above all the implementing decree, defines the contents more (…). There is in the text a little sentence, for example, which is very revealing of the approach, where one fixes the objectives of teaching. So rather than saying “the acquisition of such a thing, such a thing”, we say: “The education of a child rests on the formation of judgement through the exercise of the critical spirit and the practice of argumentation.” Article 4 of decree 131-15 of 18 December 1998. It is called “Reinforcement of compulsory schooling”, and it is henceforth in the Education Code. And so, if you like, these are not programmatic measures, they are requirements at the level of education. Now a cult — that sentence alone stands entirely at the opposite pole from the cult approach. Awakening the critical spirit and developing the practice of argumentation — I knew of no cult school that could practise such a pedagogy.”

“The critical spirit”, in the sense in which it is employed here, means “being against”. If I am viscerally against religion, I am going to advise religious people to show a critical spirit, in the sense of subscribing to my opinion. But the true critical spirit is above all a capacity to question one’s own certainties and inclinations. It is an intimate relation with oneself, resting on an uncompromising honesty. It is therefore not an instrument of rhetoric or a finger pointing at others. And it is by applying this principle to their individual lives that many spiritual groups succeed in resolving conflicts peacefully within their communities where others kill one another or dedicate eternal hatreds to one another. When the interests at stake are in reality to make certain values triumph over others to the detriment of natural differences, it seems indeed preferable to some to encourage the most primary emotional reactions rather than reason. This commission is the perfect illustration of it, seeking to prove that spiritual movements are harmful to the physical and mental health of minors when jurists and sociologists who have studied the question very closely demonstrate the contrary to us, saying that there would be less suicide, fewer conflicts, less delinquency in spiritual movements than anywhere else, and for the great majority, happy children!

DGroscolas: ”(…) I can answer your questions but I believe that the whole apparatus, 99% of it, is good. I would speak of one gap: there is a difficulty, one part is not applicable at present. Should it be reformed? It is that of families who declare that they practise instruction in the family. The law… It was already in the 1882 law, and when we spoke of it with the AMF, the Association of Mayors of France said: “Listen, we are in decentralisation, out of the question to contemplate withdrawing powers from local elected representatives to give them to central power”. And the 1882 law says that it is the mayor who has an inquiry carried out into the reason for schooling in families. First aspect: most rural communes, and certain urban communes, do not have the means to carry out this inquiry, and at present this inquiry does not take place. The texts provide that in the event the inquiry has not been carried out, it is the State’s representative, therefore the prefect, who has the inquiry carried out. But the prefects now no longer have… If one wanted to update the texts, one would have to say that it is the department which has the personnel, social workers and so on, to carry out such an inquiry. So at present, the whole apparatus of “inquiry into children schooled in families” — the inquiry does not take place. That, I leave you to appraise. I do not think it is a dramatic dimension but it would be better if it were adapted.”

This is not without recalling the speech by Mme Anne Hidalgo, first deputy mayor of Paris, at the Château de Saint-Priest on 30 March 2006, where she mentioned the decision to “set up a partnership with the Rectorate to be able, through the school establishments, to provide information to young people with the support of the school community”. Mme Hidalgo ended by saying: “For the moment, we have not met with very great success, unfortunately; well, broadly, er, today, the headmaster of Louis-le-Grand, well, there you are, it is very good, it is a very fine lycée (laughter) but it is all the same not the Parisian population as a whole…” Catherine Picard deplores the resistance of the Prefects, Daniel Groscolas that of the mayors, Anne Hidalgo that of the headmasters… These marvellous French people governed by Don Quixotes.

A parliamentarian: Do we have figures on, today, the number of children schooled in families?

DGroscolas: I cannot give exact figures, and I know that the last census has not been made. Each inspecteur d’académie has his statistics but it would be necessary for a national synthesis to be made at ministry level. It was, two or three years ago, fewer than 10,000 children, it was 7 to 8,000, of whom three-quarters were schooled by the CNED. So it must really be put in perspective, these are not great masses. On the other hand I draw the ministry’s attention in vain to an important flaw: for instruction in families, there exists an arrangement called distance teaching. Distance teaching is therefore mainly the CNED but in France, freedom of enterprise authorises — anyone can create a centre which delivers correspondence courses. Now, when the 1998 law was voted, and the texts refer to it, it was leaving distance teaching out of account. One has only to reread the parliamentary debates. It was implied that later one would look into this aspect which was not minor but not fundamental. That has not been done.

DGroscolas: “This summer, I lived through another example: 5 or 6 years ago, an academic from Brest called on me because at the university of Brest, a cult called IVI had succeeded in implanting itself within the university of Brest. We dealt with it — it was a delicate file, we dealt with it: an academic had to leave, a doctor was struck off by the Council of the Ordre des médecins; it was a big affair and we, we are not partisans of the great press conferences where things are handled gently. Well, this summer, I have just been to Brest because this academic who was at the origin of the cleaning up of the university, at present, perhaps he made a mistake, but is accused, is the object of an accusation of discrimination. (…) I was pleased to learn that you have summoned him to speak before your Commission. But I went to the tribunal de grande instance of Quimper to explain that this teacher, this academic, had had the courage against almost the whole university which, timid, did not want to call dérives sectaires into question, and it is he who finds himself in the position of the accused. So (…) in ten years, things have been reversed. Ten years ago the cults, one saw them in the street, one saw Krishna parading… Now the cults are disguised and try to reverse things, they are the accusers, and it is often those who campaign precisely for these freedoms, for human rights, who find themselves in the position of the accused.”

School support

M. Groscolas is satisfied; he has succeeded where so many others have failed: putting an end to any educational alternative with the hope of preventing anyone from offering children alternative school support.

DGroscolas: ”(…) Just now, I was saying that in France, we know of only one school of a cult character. In France, we have succeeded — it is a more difficult file — in almost making school support disappear. When we closed the schools, we noticed that a redeployment was taking place, that is to say outside the school, in the field of school support. First of all, there there is a definite legal problem. National Education, its competences, stops at teaching. There are the class hours, the programmes, National Education; after that, finished: school support is not within National Education’s competence. At the time, when I was at the Ministry, I had called my colleague from Youth and Sports to tell her: “But free time, that is you”. The answer: No, the Ministry of Youth and Sports, as the name indicates, has competence for organised leisure, has competence for sport, has competence for holiday centres from I no longer know how many days… But the rest of the time, no ministry has competence. And I was able to make several organised courses disappear (…) and in so far as there was no legal means and no competent ministry, information is the best weapon. That is to say, letting the public, the parents, know that the support courses in such a place are run by members of such a cult organisation — well, the course disappears because the parents withdraw the young people.

But it is all the same not normal that these should be private initiatives; I find that there is incontestably a void. You might tell me “but then, we live in the best of worlds”. In the end in France, it is not bad. (…) But constant vigilance is needed. If vigilance were relaxed, what has been won would disappear again. (…) I have not developed a pernicious aspect which is that of schooled children. For example, an organisation such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses gives instructions, when one reads the publications of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, gives instructions to put the children into the education system. So one might say “bravo” but it is not at all in a perspective of socialisation. I could give you the text of their latest assembly where they give extremely precise directives: one must not take part in social life, one must not vote, one must not…. But the Jehovah’s Witnesses give the children the directive to go into the schools to engage in proselytism. And that is one of the new data. I have also seen the Japanese cult, Soka Gakkai, give the same directive and it is far more pernicious. (…) That is why associations such as the one I preside over, and which now has associations in many regions, which are not necessarily called CCMM — it is “Centre for information on cults” or “Vigisectes” or… It varies from one region to another. In agreement with National Education, we endeavour to develop sequences directed at pupils at the level of pupil information, of an awareness-raising. And I am intimately convinced that education in citizenship, which develops the critical spirit, is one of the good preventions of cult risks, for nothing is worth as much as critical minds. So it is part of a whole: if one relies on republican values, the development of citizenship goes hand in hand and it is in my eyes the best prevention of cult risks.”

Muslim dérives sectaires?

A subject on which our parliamentarians seem not to want to dwell too long… Might there be a difference of treatment between “recognised religions” and “non-recognised religions”?

JMyard: (…) I would like to come back precisely to this instruction in families. You did say, I understood you clearly, that there would all the same be 10,000 children who would come under…

DGroscolas: I think 7 to 8,000.

JMyard: 7 to 8,000, well, let us grant it (…) One observes that there are a certain number of madrassas [Koranic schools] which are being set up on national territory, and with… There, the critical spirit is not entirely developed, it is rather rote learning, you see what I mean. (…) What can you tell us about that?

DGroscolas: Not much. I have no knowledge of the case you speak of, but I have been retired for 3 years and I am no longer in National Education. (…) It must be studied, I cannot tell you. What you mention, but it is not teaching, but it is a little of the same nature. In one region, it was two years ago, our regional officer says to me: “Oh, we have an odd affair, Muslim adolescents, Muslim cult”. It will no doubt happen one day, an Islamic drift, but we thought that it was. And then the intelligence was so serious about what was coming to us, I told them: warn the police and the Renseignements Généraux. And the young people were arrested at the moment when they were going to take the plane to leave for Afghanistan. So it is not of a cult character, but well, it is… Yes.

A parliamentarian: It is not teaching, then.

The “cults” change their name…

DGroscolas: (…) To give you a few illustrations of recent facts concerning young people. A few days ago, in an important institution in Paris which receives young people, in a hostel, they received the “Federation for Peace”. They were unaware — we found out too late, we told them when they had already passed through — it was Moon. That is to say, the technique consists, for the well-known cults, in creating subsidiaries with seductive names. So, there I have leaflets from Scientology, but they are not the only ones, Scientology, the association “No to Drugs, Yes to Life”, distributed in the colleges. The theme of peace is a very appealing theme among young people, the fight against drugs, cocaine and crack… That is to say, for a certain number of cult organisations, it is to take incontestable themes, seize them and use them to infiltrate. Lycée pupils were looking — it was just before the holidays — on the Internet — in a resource centre, in a college — into questions of cloning. They obtained, on a university’s website, data which emanated from Raël. Well, they alerted us and we put an end to it. But it is to show how this infiltration operates on a university’s official site — the data on cloning emanated from the Raël cult. During the demonstrations of the CPE protests, several cults invested themselves in the protest. For example, in the South West, Tabhita’s Place was present and handed out leaflets… Another organisation than Tabhita’s Place and which you no doubt know, because at election time they appear, they have all sorts of names — it is the “Humanist Movement”. They often have candidates in the legislative or European elections. The Humanist Movement is a cult and throughout France they were present in the demonstrations, because for them, the target is young people. Last year, the MIVILUDES’s report drew attention to an organisation which was called, it is the report, “the children of Ilythie”. As soon as a cult organisation has its name published in a report such as the MIVILUDES’s, it changes its name. At present, it is in Toulouse, Paris, it is called Institut AMA, which means “Applied Maternity Otherness”. The precepts of the leaflet are seductive: “preparing for a maternity” but the organisers are known as members of the ECK cult: “chronokinesis energy”. If you like, the whole difficulty is that the cults generate structures with other names and one is easily trapped. It was reported to me, but I do not have the name, in the Ariège, that the Krishna cult, based near Mirepoix, prepares and organises stays in India for young children. Recently “Ethno Médecins sans Frontières”, a new association, encourages the consumption of the drug Ayahuasca. And we have a young woman, who would moreover agree to testify on the process if, possibly, you were interested to know how the process used by such an organisation to attract young people leads them to the consumption of a prohibited drug. Those were examples…

A parliamentarian: How old is she?

DGroscolas: She must be 20.

GFenech: She is young, yes. They are not minors, that is it.

DGroscolas: Ah! You want minors…

GFenech: Yes. Well, there are also young adults who are obviously affected by the phenomenon.

A parliamentarian: It is a commission for minors!

GFenech: Absolutely.

GGeoffroy: To my knowledge, in the civic education programmes, there is no obligatory presentation of the cult phenomenon. Do you think such a proposal would be effective and useful?

DGroscolas: To me, that would seem a sound measure. (…) I believe that the cult file must find its place in what is called (…) legal, civic and social education, for I think it is not handled with young children. (…) On the other hand, when one broaches civic instruction, what a fine point of application; it makes it possible to broach all the great themes, human rights, peace in the world, and so on, and these are points of application. So there have been beginnings; in several circulars allusion is made, and in particular in the second-year class, there must be thematic sequences and at the moment, I am working on a module so that teachers have the tools to run an activity on this theme.

Parliamentary blacklists in school textbooks: a measure of civic education!

Armelle Tabary: Hearing of 13 September 2006

Armelle Tabary is director of INAVEM (Institut National d’Aide aux Victimes Et de Médiation).

The principal point raised by Armelle Tabary is the significant increase in calls to INAVEM (helpline 08VICTIMES) for cult reasons. Over the period 2002-2006, 454 calls were received with a so-called “cult” context. The increase in the number of calls for all reasons combined over this same period is 160% whereas it is 910% as regards calls for cult reasons.

Let us look at the figures for the last year. INAVEM received 36,601 calls over the period 2005-2006. Over the same period and using the percentage increases provided by Mme Tabary, one obtains about 300 calls for cult reasons, which gives a ratio of 0.8% of calls for cult reasons out of total calls. It is therefore a very low percentage.

One notes that the announcement effect is entirely different according to whether one speaks of a 910% increase in calls for cult reasons or whether one specifies a rate of calls for cult reasons of 0.8%.

Moreover, a rate of increase of 910% on a very low number of calls is much more difficult to qualify than on a large number of calls: the reasons explaining this variation are much more haphazard.

To say that the number of calls for cult reasons is low does not mean that these calls and the distress which accompanies them should be neglected, of course, but that it becomes incoherent to feed the thesis of the social scourge with these figures.

What reasons are put forward to explain nevertheless the progression in the number of calls?

JPBrard: ”(…) You mentioned the growth rate of calls; the percentages you cited are impressive, but one may wonder what causes such growth. Is it due in your view to the growth of cult phenomena or rather to the improvement of information on cult phenomena (…)”

ATabary: ”(…) It is always obviously the difficulty and the prudence needed in interpreting statistics; that is why I put them back in the context of the increase in the number of calls to 08VICTIMES (…) I wonder whether there are not both explanations; there is probably at the same time better information on this question (…). I think that in parallel, there is a rise in the growth of the number of calls on those questions (…)”

(…)

Christian Vanneste: ”(…) This rise raises a question for me, because either there is a brutal increase in a sociological phenomenon (…) and then one must really be very greatly concerned because when a phenomenon such as that develops, it is because there is a social malaise which has an importance that is entirely political (…) or else, and it is all the same the question one must ask oneself, or else the experimenter — this occurs in the physical sciences — has himself blurred the object of his observation (…) It is multiplied by five in 4 years, is that it? (…) Is it due to the fact that you function better? (…) Is there not an awareness campaign, is there not a fashion effect etc (…) I do not want to minimise the phenomenon, understand me well, my dear colleagues (…)”

ATabary: ”(…) One must consider that the first year was a start-up year and that obviously, the communication and even promotion campaigns necessarily, necessarily increased the number of calls; that is why I took up the figures from 2003, but I put them back in context. (…)”

The fashion effect mentioned by M. Vanneste is very certainly a parameter to take into account. Recently, the cult accusation against a spouse in the framework of divorce proceedings has become a “tactic” very frequently employed to win one’s case: the context of maintained fear and psychosis lends itself to it and the recent hardening of the MIVILUDES’s discourse is certainly not unconnected with the increase in calls over the last year. When one feeds a fear, people naturally invoke the alleged cause of that fear to explain their torments.

Having appraised the figures, let us look at what meanings are given to them:

ATabary: ”(…) It is appropriate to distinguish two different problematics according to whether the minor is regimented and constrained by one parent or both, or whether he affiliates himself to a group having cult practices. In the first case, therefore regimentation by one parent or both (…), the call is made by the other spouse, the grandparents, brothers, sisters, family members (…) professionals, childminder (…) who do not know how to act; the requests for help are consequent upon hospitalisations in psychiatry, suspicions of paedophile acts, threats, mental manipulations, rapes, non-presentation of children, lack of care, physical ill-treatment, malicious telephone calls, intrafamily violence or unlawful confinement. Call sheets also concern young girls victims of incest by their father, still manipulated by him at the moment of the call, children who run away to escape a parent’s right of access, supporting cult practices, who call 08VICTIMES to be informed (…) In the second case, therefore that of the minor or young adult (…) who affiliates himself to a group, there it is the child’s parents who contact 08VICTIMES because they are without means of action; notably, numerous calls relate to worrying Internet sites or to the adolescent’s adherence to a gothic group (…)”

The offences mentioned by Mme Tabary in the preceding list are identical to those one might observe in the rest of the population: what criteria are therefore used to attribute these complaints to a dérive sectaire, in so far as the corresponding criteria are applicable to all types of groups? What makes a rapist who may be a member of a “cult” different from a rapist tout court? And what justifies making this difference? Can one prove that there are more rapists in the said cults?

CLecocq: ”(…) Are there procedures, practices, cross-checks which pass, fundamentally, from a call for help such as you mentioned to an established practice? Do you have statistics which, over all your calls, over 100% of your calls, 90% are established practices of cult phenomena, and then, since you mentioned the term referral (…), in relation to established phenomena, how many were there — and do you have statistics — on judicial referrals, this time, in relation to the foundation of our law, which is “the criminally reprehensible practice” (…)?”

ATabary: ”(…) In the current state of our figures we have no feedback; if you like, we have a call to 08VICTIMES, the listener is going to direct it to the ADFI Paris, we do not have (…) the feedback from that call (…) My evaluation stops when the call is directed to another service (…)”

Mme Tabary has no “feedback” and therefore cannot pronounce on the subject. Let us note that she specified earlier that of the 453 calls for cult reasons received between 2002 and 2006, 23% were the object of a criminal referral (i.e. the listener considers that there is a criminal offence and enters this offence on a sheet) and that the rest of the calls were redirected to the ADFI and the CCMM. Who checks the way these calls entered UNADFI’s statistics?

Since the statistics of criminal convictions are not available, how can M. Lecoq conclude that 90% of the calls are established practices of cult phenomena? Does the criminal referral by an INAVEM listener have the value of a conviction? Does the direction of a call to the ADFI have the value of a court decision?

(…)

JMyard: ”(…) You have made very general remarks in which you demonstrate to us that indeed, there is an increase in the attempts by cults to reach children in particular, but you manage to identify them: what are these cults which are at work, because we have been left a little unsatisfied on that side.”

ATabary: ”(…) The cult’s name is not systematically cited for a simple reason, which is that the listener is trained and takes the call to evaluate a situation of danger or a victim’s situation (…) In all honesty it is the direction to the ADFI which helped us (…) to bring out these figures for you because that theme, targeted so precisely in a general national helpline, it is true that we do not do it, you see, automatically (…)”

M. Myard’s hunger will have to be confronted with reality: the problem of cults as it is apprehended by the commission does not exist, and the difficulty of many bodies in providing facts and figures is not due to their lack of coordination but to the reduced number of genuine breaches of the law.

PVuilque: ”(…) Do you work with the MIVILUDES? (…)”

ATabary: ”(…) We work with the MIVILUDES on information; that is to say that to draft this text, I asked a little how we had feedback, or how we worked with the MIVILUDES. In fact the people in my service who are the reference points on these questions regularly look for information (…) So it is true, I said it, in my few lines of conclusion, we have requests for up-to-date lists, we know very well fundamentally that it is probably difficult or even impossible, since these updates would probably have to be daily, but the requests to the MIVILUDES are many requests for up-to-date information (…)”

The MIVILUDES is the body most represented in this commission both on the deputies’ side and on the side of those heard. It is symptomatic that Mme Tabary should be asked for information on the cult phenomenon which she herself asks of the MIVILUDES. The commission’s information turns in a closed vessel.

As for blacklists, updated daily, we do not wish to imagine that our secular state will go that far…

Catherine Picard: Hearing of 23 September 2006

Commentary and selected extracts:

Note: The video of Mme Picard’s hearing is not available on the National Assembly’s site: http://www.lcpan.fr/sommaire_secte.asp

Madame Catherine Picard is president of the Union Nationale des Associations de défense de la Famille et de l’Individu (UNADFI).

The ideological extremism of Mme Picard’s remarks has the advantage of revealing in its wake the discriminatory and anti-secular positions of certain members of the commission.

The evident complicity of several participants in this commission — Mme Picard addressing the President: “I am putting you to contribution…”, Mme David speaking of Mme Picard: “it bothers me to say “vous” to her because I know her well” — brings to mind a band of long-standing friends meeting for form’s sake, in “an almost festive air”, who have concluded among themselves an agreement in principle allowing them to close ranks around one and the same doctrine which all the interventions aim to justify. Might it be for this misplaced and too conspicuous connivance that Mme Picard’s hearing is not available on the National Assembly’s site?

CPicard: ” (…) UNADFI wished to bring a certain number of documents: five notebooks which are the illustration of the cult phenomenon concerning minors, (…) We have brought to the commission, which seemed to have very precise requests as regards testimonies (…), a summary of 112 cases whose content the commission will appraise, which take up the types of ill-treatment (…), the groups or the techniques (…) 112 which seem to me to illustrate somewhat the subject we have to deal with”

The source of evaluation of these illustrations is a single one. It is indispensable to cross-check several sources: which is not the case today and therefore renders the corresponding evaluations biased. We have cited the example of the calls to INAVEM’s 08VICTIMES, of which, according to Mme Armelle Tabary, a great majority is “routed” to UNADFI. The way these calls entered the statistics ought not to be the sole doing of the ADFIs.

CPicard: “We consider as victims the victims directly concerned by the manipulations of which they have been the object, but also those close to them; the consequences of cult membership are destructive of the family, social and civic bond.”

How many hundreds, indeed thousands, of citizens accused of cult membership would be ready to testify to the contrary if only they could be heard?

How many children are “victims”? Mme Picard cites 350 affairs before the courts which she asserts are of cult types (for adults and minors); this figure is derisory (this remark does not minimise the possible suffering linked to the affairs). What is the outcome of these affairs, knowing moreover that the legal and sociological community agrees in the majority that the so-called cult criteria have no pertinence or legal value?

CPicard: ”(…) Not to mention that one must emphasise the courage there is in testifying publicly to a life’s path when there may weigh on some, threats, harassment, intimidation. The current collusion of cult movements, their organisation within pseudo rights-defence associations… — there, I have left a few suspension points — represent a potential danger for the victims, the associations and the professionals who have spoken out.”

In anti-cult discourse, the accusation of cult takes the “accused” out of the secular framework. Once the accusation is made, the targeted people or movements even lose, in the eyes of some, the right to defend themselves against these accusations, and the accusers grant themselves the right of discrimination. These conceptions of democracy are incompatible with those of a State governed by the rule of law.

CPicard: “One must not neglect today, with regard to cult evolution, the constitution of currents, of networks led by experimenters with care or education techniques whose fancifulness rivals the dangerousness of their consequences; some would call them charlatans of the body and of the mind.”

Who determines “cult evolution”? A handful of parliamentarians and anti-cult associations who decide on the cult character of an approach, as others shape history, according to the political needs of the moment?

CPicard: (…) The decisions of the various European bodies are often cited by our detractors. (…) I would like to remind the commission of recommendation 1412 of 1999 on the illegal activities of cults. The Assembly of the Council of Europe, in its article 9, indicates: that it attaches great importance to the protection of the most vulnerable and notably of the children of adherents of groups of a religious, esoteric or spiritual character, in cases of ill-treatment, rape, absence of care, indoctrination, brainwashing — it is the Assembly of the Council of Europe which does not say “mental manipulation” but “brainwashing” — and of non-schooling which makes any control on the part of the social services impossible. I believe that in this decision, all the words and all the ills are pronounced.”

Mme Picard makes a very selective choice from this recommendation.

Article 1 of the recommendation considers “recourse to major legislation for cults inopportune”; article 2 “invites the State authorities to refrain from taking measures founded on a value judgement relating to beliefs”; and the rest of the articles invite the exchange of information, the education of adolescents as regards “information on the history and philosophy of the great currents of thought and of religions, aimed notably at adolescents, within the framework of school programmes”, the creation of international networks for the exchange “of reliable information on the said groupings, which comes exclusively neither from the cults themselves nor from the associations for the defence of victims of cults, and to disseminate it widely to the general public, after the persons concerned have had the possibility of being heard on the objectivity of such information” with the help of “national or regional centres of information on groups of a religious, esoteric or spiritual character which are independent of the State”. It also invites “encouraging an approach to religious groups marked by understanding, tolerance, dialogue and conflict resolution; taking firm measures against any action which constitutes discrimination or which marginalises minority religious or spiritual groups.” It asks the committee of Ministers, among other things, “to create a European observatory on groups of a religious, esoteric or spiritual character whose task would be to facilitate exchanges between the national centres.”

CPicard: ”(…) Through the study of the cases we are offering to the commission, we can measure the complexity of the situations encountered and better understand the perplexity of the professionals confronted with these cases. Trouble, fright and rout are often the reactions of magistrates, of family affairs judges, of educational or social workers. Great is the step to be taken on training and on explaining the cult problematic still in our country (…)”.

”(…) This disarray is orchestrated by the maintained confusion, mingling the dimension of beliefs and of religion in the remarks commonly divulged by some sociologists of religion and by the cults themselves (…)”

To want to explain the cult problematic, alleged to be complex, to magistrates and administrations, while considering recourse to sociologists of religion and ethnologists — whose profession is to understand human groups — useless, is contradictory.

Anti-cult discourse is based on rumour, which makes it possible to dispense with proofs. It is not surprising that this discourse is at variance with the academic and scientific approach.

CPicard: ”(…) It has been difficult for us to put a case in each category because the complexity of the cult phenomenon when it involves children is conclusive. (…) One is bound to observe that the law on minors is not enough to protect children from the harmful influence, both moral and physical, of cult movements or of their predators. We can only ask the commission to give clear recommendations and above all to ask those who will follow them up to have them applied. (…)”

The remark is simple and has not varied: cults are harmful, a way must be found to prove it and to judge them as “cults”. To justify this point of view, one must indeed “trace the whole path backwards”, by seeking facts and texts which would corroborate these assertions rather than starting from facts to draw from them a tangible and verifiable conclusion.

CPicard: ” (…) in the penal code, in the civil code, in all the codes (…), we have all the tools to respond to attacks on physical integrity. Where it becomes a little more complex is when one attacks (…) everything relating to infringements of psychic integrity, because there we fall back into all the pitfalls of expert assessment where sometimes one, two, three experts are needed, not to mention that a certain number of these experts are not necessarily, er, I was going to say, on the line that some of us may defend in this room (…)”

”(…) When there is rape of a minor, there is rape of a minor; so the court is going to work on the rape but it is going to push away the cult dimension.”

”(…) It is going to be necessary that on the other side, magistrates take the cult phenomenon into account, because if one never takes the cult phenomenon into account in order to give application to the law [editor’s note: the About-Picard Act], we shall never have definitive convictions. I mean, we are going round in circles somewhat on that subject. (…)”

The “cult” categorisation of offences was raised on many occasions during the commission’s hearings. It amounts to pointing the finger at a whole population considered outside the norm and to singling out that population’s delinquency. This singling out aims in fact to judge ideas and doctrines.

One of the objectives of the CICNS’s citizens’ commission of inquiry is to verify whether the delinquency of spiritual minorities is significant.

As regards the offence of mental manipulation, it constitutes the most questionable achievement of the anti-cult struggle in several respects. Scientifically, first of all (see the video of Massimo Introvigne); legislatively, since the corresponding French law, the About-Picard Act of 2001, is a discriminatory law which its authors say is limited to “cults” — political parties and trade unions, for example, were explicitly, though orally, excluded from the law’s scope by the law’s rapporteur (C. Picard, AN I, p. 5721; she makes a reminder a little later (p. 5751): “In no case could trade unions, professional groupings or political movements be targeted”); juridically, since the vagueness of the notion of “psychological subjection” mentioned in the law (a legally acceptable expression of mental manipulation) makes the judge dependent on the opinion of experts; who in France can seriously call himself an expert for the prosecution on so delicate a subject?

M. Fenech: ” (…) You are citing an example of a child who is entrusted by the Administration — the DDASS — to a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses. That can only leave one perplexed. What is your comment on that? Can this kind of thing still happen today? Does the fact that we are in a regime of republican laws… Must one take account — it is a reflection which, I think, you have pursued — of a membership or not of this or that organisation for host families? Can that be taken into consideration? In what manner? Without coming into contradiction with the texts on the fight against discrimination… (…)?” Mme Picard: ” I think that it is not the fact that he is a Jehovah’s Witness or that he is an Adventist or that he is… — I do not know, I am going to take others, one at random — that he belongs to the Universal White Brotherhood or to the Kryeon group that is important; it is the fact of knowing how, in a legal manner, we are going to be able to demonstrate that the doctrines which are advocated inside such and such a group are prejudicial to a child’s flourishing and to his future.”

GFenech: “But at the level of a director of Health and Social Affairs, does he have on his desk the directive of the New York Convention on the rights of the child in order to say: I cannot give this child to this family? Are we not in a regime of a very great legal hypocrisy?”

JMyard: “Thank you, dear colleagues. I do think all the same that to entrust a child, knowingly, to a family which is Jehovist poses a problem…. It is not a question of freedom of conscience. We know that the corpus — I would say — of indoctrination, of that family’s attitude is in many respects contrary to what we wish, in a consensual manner, for a child’s awakening. So, I think that indeed that poses a problem. Freedom of conscience is not at stake but here it is a matter of entrusting a child to a family which is going to implement precepts which most of us condemn.”

GFenech: ” Once you have said that, Monsieur Myard, I address myself again to Madame Picard: you still have not found the solution to the problem!”

JMyard: “Yes, I do not entrust a child to a mother…”

GFenech: “Yes, but there you will go straight to a case before the Conseil d’État for discrimination….”

JMyard: “No, I am not going to a case…. I win it because I have objective elements which say that this child risks being in danger.”

CPicard: “Part of the answers …”

GFenech: ” Is there a directive from the Ministry of health and from the Ministry of…” CPicard: “Not as such (…)”

The deputies and Mme Picard come back there to a notion resembling the offence of membership. It is worrying to see deputies trample on the laïcité of which they call themselves the defenders.

Christian Vanneste: ”(…) Madam, you took an example just now which poses a problem, in so far as the facts which took place in that family are certainly entirely reprehensible but are neither objectively nor intrinsically linked to membership of the cult. Those facts were not the application of the doctrines and rules proper to that cult.

And in this instance, that leads me to put a question to you. We listened to our Belgian friends who, with their usual common sense, when they speak of cults and of the problems, restrict their reflection to their action, to “harmful” or “injurious” cults (…).

That distinction had greatly interested me because it takes us precisely from the subjective to the objective. When one forbids blood transfusion, for example, one can there put forward a criterion of objectivity.

When on the other hand “members” of a cult engage in criminal behaviour which is not however dictated by the cult, that does not it seems make it possible to forbid anything whatever against the cults except by falling within the framework of discrimination, which appears obvious.”

These remarks by M. Vanneste are without any doubt the most balanced words of the whole hearing.

Mme Picard then applies herself to discrediting points of doctrine of the Raëlians and of Sahaja Yoga.

Christian Vanneste: ”(…) You answered yes, that is to say that indeed, there is a possibility of defining, according to the texts notably, the groupings which objectively present a harmful character.”

Mme Picard: “For a very long time, in the name of the principles of freedom of conscience, one had… I was going to say restricted oneself and one said: doctrines are none of our business from the moment they are not directly injurious to public order, to the laws of the Republic, etc. (…) one is bound to observe that in order to substantiate these files and to answer the types of question you have put, it was indeed necessary to plunge into the source of the cult movements and to look (…)”

M. Vanneste quickly lets himself be convinced of the necessity of evaluating (judging?) doctrines. This judgement underlies many remarks in the hearings. One will regret that M. Fenech did not specify, as he had done with M. Roulet, that the commission does not have to judge doctrines.

UNADFI grants itself a sociological, theological or doctrine-appraising competence, a competence on alternative health approaches, which it does not have. Its public-utility status gives it a licence for mediated appraisals and an audience which prevent a democratic debate. The responsibility for re-establishing the balance is urgent and it falls to the public authorities.

Jean-Yves Dupuis and Pierre Polivka: Hearing of 10 October 2006

Commentary and selected extracts:

Messieurs Jean-Yves Dupuis and Pierre Polivka are inspectors general of national education and representatives of the Unit for the Prevention of Cult Phenomena of National Education, CPPS.

First of all a general impression:

The commission fights inch by inch against the evidence and asserts its values and judgements, faced with officials trained in the fight against cults but fundamentally honest and whose factual report contradicts the deputies’ alarmist theories.

In introduction, Jean-Yves Dupuis makes the following declaration: “M. Polivka and I launched an inquiry with all the Inspecteurs d’Académie very quickly, in anticipation of our appearance before this commission, so as to have an idea of the situation for the school year just past. Now for the school year just past we have … the inspecteurs d’académie or the rectors carried out 19,000 reports … well, let us say … 19,000 reports to the Public Prosecutors, concerning children who were considered to be in danger … in danger for various reasons, physical, moral, etc. … And when we asked the inspecteurs d’académie which, among these children in danger, were so because of cult movements, they replied to us that there were 8.”

Everyone declares themselves surprised by this figure, but it is the lesson drawn from it that is for us really surprising. Let us quote M. Polivka: “There has been important work by the inspection corps and the territorial inspection corps, and this mobilisation, I believe, has led the cults to approach young people by other channels than through school.”

This line of argument is taken up throughout the hearing and directs the inquiry towards the trail of home education and homework help. We wonder how none of the deputies present noticed the ineptitude of this analysis.

First of all, it implies that it is surprising that the so-called cult groups have not managed to infiltrate the school framework in order to put children in danger there.

Apart from the fact that nothing proves they had the intention, one wonders in reality how any group whatever could manage it.

In fact, the 19,000 “reports of children in danger” are, for the great majority of this type of report, and always have been, reports of ill-treatment which takes place outside the school environment, as M. Polivka will later confirm.

The true value of this figure is therefore evaded throughout the hearing.

The school is a privileged place for observing children. The personnel of National Education have, for ten years, received substantial information on the subject of dérives sectaires, as MM. Dupuis and Polivka will recall. If, over one year, only 8 cases of children in danger supposedly linked to a “dérive sectaire” are reported among the whole population attending the establishments inspected by National Education, it is in all likelihood because the problem of child ill-treatment due to a dérive sectaire is insignificant.

We would even say that the phenomenon is non-existent, that there is no particular danger for a child in being born to parents belonging to what we call the new spiritualities and stigmatised in France under the name of cults.

The 8 cases noted are perhaps indeed cases of ill-treatment taking place in one of the millions of French households which one may connect in one way or another with the renewal of spirituality in the West. This figure is then quite representative of what is observed by the sociologists who take a close interest in this renewal, that is to say that it is not the seat of any particular criminality and that the population concerned does not carry, any more than the rest of the population, the germ of a delinquency in the legal sense of the term.

We are even led to believe that a comparative analysis between this figure and the one produced by the rest of the French population (19,000) would show that the new spiritualities are settings particularly unlikely to carry a danger for children.

The reasoning followed by the commission’s members is quite different and could be synthesised as follows: cults exist, are an important and evil-doing phenomenon, and if nothing or almost nothing appears, it is because it is happening outside our field of vision.

The rest of the hearing is therefore essentially spent defining those fields about which one may suppose what one likes, since nothing there would have been until now inspected in any specific manner by the State.

One of these fields of investigation is correspondence teaching. The inspectors inform us that it is the doing of National Education by way of the CNED for 3,983 of the 4,463 children concerned.

As for the other children, taught at a distance by private bodies, the inspectors say that they for the most part join the category of children instructed at home, who cannot escape National Education’s inspection.

This last category is the subject of particular attention from the commission.

Let us recall that it is a legal choice offered to every citizen without his having to justify it (read on this subject the following article: “Compulsory school: the children first!”.

From the discussion around this subject, a consensus emerges between the deputies and the inspectors of National Education. A consensus asserting that it is surprising to educate one’s children outside National Education and private schools under contract, that to contest the theory of evolution is an attack on “republican ideology”, but also — and no one will note the contradiction with what precedes — a teachers’ commonplace: “the baccalaureate, these days, no longer represents much”.

M. Fenech will nevertheless remark that one may conclude from the presentation and the answers of the two inspectors, “in an extremely paradoxical manner, that there is more inspection in the establishments outside contract of the child’s civic future than in our republican schools”.

In fact, under the pretext of the fight against dérives sectaires, the 1998 law relating to compulsory schooling imposes drastic inspections on the pupil instructed at home. Despite these inspections, and according to the inspectors of National Education, only 23 children out of the 2,869 instructed at home would be given formal notice, for the year 2006, to enter an establishment “under contract” or a public one owing to insufficient results, with the following precision from M. Polivka: “Children educated in families are not so because the parents systematically belong to cult movements; they are so most of the time for purely ideological reasons which stem most of the time from a distrust of families towards the teaching dispensed by the… the network of public schools.”

The field of investigation of home instruction therefore does not appear any more exploitable by the commission than that of correspondence instruction. Unless one decides — despite the inspectors’ assertions as to the seriousness of the figures they give — to call these figures into question and to suppose that very many children escape all census and are secretly instructed at home or that, unbeknown to all, their physical or mental health is in danger.

That is the trail the commission seems ready to follow if one is to believe Martine David’s discourse:

“So when one adds all that up, it makes all the same, with what we have seen at the level of the CNED (we suppose there was a misunderstanding on Martine David’s part on this point) etc. a certain number of children … it makes several thousand children who on national territory are not … followed, “supervised”, and therefore about whom one can really have a real approach in relation to the possible abuses of cult movements?”

Another “interesting” moment of the hearing is the discussion on the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

GFenech: “Are children who belong to Jehovah’s Witness families not the object of reports?”

JYDupuis: “No, I usually say (…) so it is true that it is provocation … for National Education the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses are (…) perfect pupils (…) they are perfectly disciplined, they work (…) it is not from them that we are going to have problems (…) so it is true that there is a serious problem which Monsieur Brard pointed out (…) but it is true that we do not in fact report that kind of thing (…)”

GFenech: “Why?”

JYDupuis: “Because it seems to us that they are not really in danger …”

(silence)

JPBrard: National Education indeed has as its object to develop the critical spirit; can one consider that the Jehovah’s Witnesses do not make children who are crippled intellectually speaking …

(silence)

First of all, we are here to defend the secular school …. That is to say that we do not have to know the religious membership of the children attending the schools … that is quite clear … our concern … I believe that the mission which is ours is really to defend laïcité; it is the principle which guides us in all circumstances.

PPolivka: “You put a precise question about the Jehovah’s Witnesses (…) I confirm what my colleague says (…), never have we had a report from teachers, from pupils’ parents, from elected representatives alerting us to the behaviour of Jehovah’s Witness children … It is true that we often know them better than the others, because often indeed Jehovah’s Witness children are pupils who affirm their commitment. Moreover their parents are often known for (…) if only through door-to-door work as you know (…) the Kingdom Halls are known to everyone (…) but one is bound to observe that we have not known (…) we have no knowledge, and it was not to overstate the case (…) that often they are children who are particularly well adapted to our school organisation and who are pupils, I was going to say (…) model ones (…) it is not the right expression, but pupils who are (…) I was going to say (…) who follow a schooling which poses the fewest problems. One must say things as they are … and we have no reports (…) we, National Education, do not have to pass judgement on the religious or non-religious choice of the pupils or parents who attend our schools. We are there to combat all proselytism since we are there to watch over the principle of laïcité (…)”

This exchange is highly symptomatic, as is the reaction which followed it. We see face to face deputies issuing value judgements which amount to defamation, and scrupulous officials asserting facts in flagrant contradiction with those judgements. This contradiction, which calls into question the commission of inquiry’s very reason for existing, makes the deputy-mayor Martine David positively leap up, so to speak.

Martine David: “Serge is momentarily giving me his turn to speak (…) I thank the President because precisely I am reacting a little to this; I was re-checking your title (…) Unit for the Prevention of Cult Phenomena (…) And you say: National Education does not consider (…) that the children (…) being among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or having Jehovah’s Witness parents (…) risk much in their education, in their flourishing. In the name of what can National Education say that? Because the testimonies we have (…) and I am sure that National Education, like other State administrations, show the contrary! So no doubt these children are not beaten (…) are not physically assaulted (…) are not subjected to violence (…) no doubt! But to what point (…) the difficulty of sustaining an education which differentiates them from the others (…) — so certainly perhaps not in their school results, but that is not everything, Monsieur — (…) and that shocks me a little, because (…) so it is not you as such (…) it is I believe more broadly that National Education (…) National Education issues a judgement and, where I wanted to intervene, was that I was telling myself that in the training which now (…) is all the same more widely dispensed, including towards teachers, no doubt towards your correspondents in the departments in the… in the academic inspectorates (…) Is this question broached a little more than in the past (…) that is to say, does one (…) without putting it on the same plane but (…) does one point out that a child on whom one imposes (…) a PERMANENT differentiation (…) PERMANENT in relation to his little schoolmates and it can last the whole time of schooling (…) allow me (…) BUT THAT MAY PROVE A REAL SUFFERING. So, I say, we are not going to continue — National Education — to close our eyes to this behaviour and to these risks.”

So, according to Madame la députée, the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses suffer from feeling different, and this suffering has as its cause the education given by Jehovah’s Witness parents. It is of course a personal judgement which an official could not reproduce in the exercise of his functions, which would be contrary to the principle of laïcité. That is however what Martine David exhorts National Education to do, reproaching it with issuing a judgement… “that is not critical with regard to the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

We do not know whether the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses suffer more or less than the average, but the discrimination resulting from the policy against dérives sectaires is assuredly a factor of ill-being which ought to be studied closely.

We wonder in particular about the impact that M. Brard’s public declarations may have on the social or family well-being of Jehovah’s Witness children — insinuating for example that they are “crippled intellectually speaking” through their parents’ fault.

Other extracts from M. Polivka’s intervention:

“By way of illustration, operations — I do indeed say operations — mounted for example in 1999, when the Steiner schools were suspected. So all the inspecteurs d’académies, in the greatest secrecy, had been engaged in an operation and one December morning, all the Steiner schools were visited by the inspectors.”

(…)

“Likewise the operations which were conducted, my colleague recalled it, at Tabitha’s Place, against Tabitha’s Place, were also sufficiently publicised…”

What is here named an operation against an association of persons, or described as a police raid, is indeed, let us be clear, the form an academic inspection may take when it is carried out on a spiritual minority.

A few other illuminating factual data gleaned during the hearing:

JYDupuis: (…) There is all the same another figure which could support this figure which indeed appeared derisory to you. It is true that the activity of the CCPS (Unit for the Prevention of Cult Phenomena) has not ceased to decline for years. Last year for example, we were seised of 3 cases of children considered to be in danger.

Concerning teachers whose membership of a cult movement is said to have posed a problem:

JYDupuis: “I had the directorate of teaching personnel search for teaching personnel brought before a disciplinary council for these reasons: we had two removals from the register in 2003 and 2004…”

Concerning teachers who are said to have undergone cult regimentation during an in-service training course:

PPolivka: “Well, know that there too, we are attentive to it, and since it depends on the authority of the rectors, so the rectors follow that with good attention. We saw, we had a suspicion in one académie a year or two ago, we conducted a serious investigation and in fact, we realised that it was not … cult propaganda…”

Concerning the 3 “cult schools” (in the inspectors’ terms) listed in France.

PPolivka: “So there is a big problem, on Tabitha’s Place (…) Tabitha’s Place set itself up next to Oloron (…) at Laruns, half an hour from the Spanish border … and as if by chance it has just set itself up in the suburbs of Mulhouse, half an hour from the Swiss or German border…

When we trigger inspections in these cult schools (…) as if by chance the number of pupils concerned diminishes enormously in relation to the data the Gendarmerie was able to provide us with (…) That is to say that at the last inspection we made at Sus two years ago, only, from memory, eleven pupils were present whereas the gendarmerie indicated to us (…) In reality there must be about fifty concerned by this school.

For the number at Mulhouse it is a very small beginning, there would be 3 pupils, but we were unable to verify because our IEN (Inspector of National Education) had the door slammed in his face (…) and as for the school the Plymouth Brethren have just opened, there would be 150 pupils concerned.”

There is an emergence of common sense and of reality legible in this hearing, where it is reported that men in the field, the teachers in direct contact with children and parents, do not manage, despite the efforts of their hierarchy to educate them in it, to detect more than 8 cases corresponding to the nonetheless broad description of the cult deviance undermining the physical or moral integrity of a child.

The CICNS is attentively observing what publicity will be given to this emergence by the media, the organs of the State and finally the national assembly.

Didier Leschi: Hearing of 17 October 2006

Commentary and selected extracts:

Didier Leschi is head of the central bureau of religious affairs at the Ministry of the Interior. His intervention at his hearing before the third parliamentary commission of inquiry into cults is significant. It shows that a certain number of people in government have understood the difficulty of the questions raised and, faced with this difficulty, refuse to practise conflation.

There is of course the question of the Jehovah’s Witnesses since this commission shines a particular spotlight on this group. Beyond M. Leschi’s conclusions concerning the religious-association status of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and blood transfusion, we retain above all an approach to the subject of spiritual minorities very different from the fight against dérives sectaires practised by bodies such as the MIVILUDES, the anti-cult associations and the deputies in charge of the commission of inquiry.

The supposed disturbance of public order, ceaselessly invoked in this commission, leads in principle, sooner or later, to a court action or to an opinion of the Conseil d’État. It therefore appears natural in a secular State governed by the rule of law to refer in the last resort to the decisions of these bodies to evaluate the disturbance of public order. That is in substance M. Leschi’s approach, which is in conformity with the content of the 1905 Act.

Apparently, the commission’s deputies do not see it that way and explain that a level of disturbance exists which is not taken into account by case law but is nevertheless significant and documented, for example, in the various international conventions for the defence of children’s rights (such as the New York convention).

The commission invokes “victims’ testimonies” to support its theses of the dangerousness of spiritual minorities. Even if these testimonies must be heard, they can in no way constitute a sufficient element to assert a dangerousness in a global manner: in these situations, what share falls to human behaviours which one could find in any organisation whatever, and what share of these behaviours may be attributed to the group’s doctrine?

Let us recognise moreover that if one evaluated any organisation whatever on the basis solely of the testimony of the people who leave it and turn against it, none would survive. But evidently, in this case, that is the aim sought.

The commission’s deputies consider, without elements of proof, that a threat not grasped by the courts must be taken into account. Let us grant it. But then, the members of this commission have not assembled the expertise required to evaluate this new “disturbance of public order”. The question having been subtly shifted from the sphere of law towards a sphere of psychological, sociological, ethnological evaluation, are we to be made to believe that the few people heard, from whom the minorities are absent (they received only a questionnaire published on our site), will allow the deputies to appraise justly all the minorities they target?

DLeschi: (…) In putting an end to the system of recognised religions, (the 1905 Act) also specified that the faithful have the right to practise their religion publicly and not solely in the private sphere, as is specified in particular by titles 3 and 5 of the 1905 Act (…) This freedom of belief is articulated with the right of parents to choose what they wish to transmit to their children, for our legal framework also includes the right of parents to educate their children in the values of their choice provided that these do not undermine the physical and moral integrity of the children — that is what article 371-1 of the Civil Code recalls: “Parental authority belongs to fathers and mothers until the child’s majority or emancipation, in order to protect him in his safety, his health and his morality, to ensure his education and to permit his development in the respect due to his person”.

(…) To this must be added the European Convention on Human Rights, which says that the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their religious or philosophical convictions; where applicable, non-compliance with these obligations could constitute an offence against persons, liable to sanctions, and a disturbance of public order if this non-compliance is systematised within an associative framework.

(…) The activity of the central bureau of religious affairs has just reminded the administrations, the local authorities and the various public authorities, by means of circulars, of replies to parliamentary questions or of letters emanating from public authorities, that our legal regime is first of all one of freedom of conscience and of the free exercise of religion.

(…) The Ministry of the Interior is sometimes accused of underestimating the disturbance of public order that certain movements focusing the attention of the MIVILUDES would by their nature generate. I mean movements which for some have decades, indeed centuries of existence and are issued from great spiritual currents or attach themselves to them, such as “the Plymouth Brethren”, one of the branches of Protestantism, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and for some months now the Lubavitch [1], who are the expression of an old tradition of Jewish Hasidism. At the central bureau of religious affairs we think that public-order problems must be approached with the greatest rigour and that facts must be preferred to rumour or to the painful word of former faithful who have broken away, once persons and their dignity are called into question. All religious currents are liable to experience dérives sectaires. Only the examination of the facts legitimises the notion of vigilance; without which one runs a strong risk of departing from secular impartiality in favour of a cleavage between recognised religion/stigmatised religion. The administrative judge never ceases to recall this by penalising local authorities which dismiss Jehovah’s Witnesses whose only professional fault is membership of that movement. Likewise he recalls that one cannot refuse the hire of a hall to that movement solely because it would not be approved (…) Proselytism, that is to say campaigning to make known and to defend one’s opinions in the street or by going door to door, is not in itself condemnable; provided of course that it is not a matter of harassment. By analogy, one does not imagine withdrawing from a voluntary seller of “L’Humanité Dimanche” the custody of his child, any more than from a trade unionist who marches on the first of May, his daughter (…) It is therefore indeed the refusal of blood transfusion which could constitute a disturbance of public order, if it turned out that the assertion of this imperious belief impeded the functioning of the public hospital service. It is not for the administration to pass judgement on people’s beliefs or on their conscience, unless one is to hark back to other times or to other political regimes. The Catholic Church may condemn abortion, provided for by law, but it would disturb public order only if, through its demonstrations, it prevented women’s access to the hospital service. I recall that the Conseil d’État, in a decision of 16 August 2002, held that the refusal to receive a blood transfusion constitutes the exercise of a fundamental freedom and that the Kouchner Act of March 2002 reinforced the right of the adult patient to discuss his treatment, a right already enshrined by the case law of the Conseil d’État. (…) With a view to this hearing, it seemed to me necessary to ask the departmental prefectures to draw up a census, over the last three years, of incidents linked to transfusion. In the light of the results obtained, what comes back is a small number of incidents, often settled by discussion: never has an incident calling into question children, or the vital prognosis, or the functioning of the public hospital service been reported to me over these last three years.

(…) It was in January 1993 that the Conseil d’État held that the Kingdom Halls of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were places of worship and that on that ground they should be exempted from property tax, and the free exercise of religion naturally supposes the freedom to open places of worship; that is the object of the central bureau of religious affairs’ circular of 14 February 2005 which asked the Prefects to recall this fundamental right to mayors, given the abusive practices of pre-emption rights and of refusal of building permits which were tending to multiply.

(…) In several divorce proceedings, one observes that the religious affiliation of one of the parents is invoked before the judge by his or her spouse at every turn. Case law has put a little order into this by recalling that one must first assess the well-being of the child by specifying the established harmful consequences for the child and not by presupposing them from the parent’s spiritual affiliation.

(…) However, this opprobrium does not correspond to the feeling of the local populations who rub shoulders with the adherents. It is on the basis of this observation that Jacques Barrot, then deputy for Haute-Loire, had asked, in agreement with the Plymouth Brethren, a specialist in religious movements to make a study of this movement which could be made public. It is the study by Madame Blandine Chélini-Pont of the university of Aix. This study was not sufficient and the Plymouth Brethren asked a CNRS researcher, Sébastien Fath, to carry out another study on them in a concern for transparency. In this respect, this will to transparency on the part of movements which feel unjustly stigmatised is found also among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have always said they were in favour of a study of the young people of their movement provided it were entrusted to recognised academics such as those who work with the president of the EHESS [2], Mme Hervieu-Léger, or again in the CNRS laboratory [3] studying religions and laïcité directed by Jean-Paul Willaime. Such a will to transparency, I believe, must be underlined. Strengthened therefore by these scientific studies and by testimonies from people frequenting the Plymouth Brethren, the MIVILUDES’s earlier study had moderated its judgement on this movement by recognising that the accusations brought against them did not entirely correspond to reality. However, the MIVILUDES’s 2005 report makes the Plymouth Brethren reappear as liable to dérives sectaires in the education of children. That is naturally not to be excluded, but the file still needs to be substantiated in a rigorous and precise manner. Now, in this affair, we are once again in forms of approximation which may in the long run discredit the necessary and legitimate action of the public authorities against dérives sectaires.

More precisely, the new case for the prosecution is fed by 3 elements which raise questions:

1st element: the declarations of the former president of AVIF [4] are highlighted although he was convicted of defamatory remarks against the Plymouth Brethren by the TGI of Lyon on 4 January 2005.

2nd element: it is indicated in the report that the Plymouth Brethren refuse all public schooling; this is factually inaccurate and, moreover, the current president of AVIF followed part of his compulsory schooling in the public education system although he had explained the contrary to the MIVILUDES.

3rd element, also important for assessing the dérive sectaire with regard to Plymouth Brethren children: it is not indicated that the correspondence teaching centre, the lycée Lechêne, which they set up has obtained the approval of the Ministry of Education. This centre is inspected by the regional pedagogical inspector of the Ministry of Education attached to the Académie of Lille.

According to the information supplied to the prefect of the Rhône, the inspections carried out show that the children experience an intellectual and physical development in conformity with what one is entitled to expect at their age. This inspector declares, I quote: “that the work is rigorous in form and in substance, that the course gives an impression of seriousness, that the person in charge is a former secondary-school principal who moreover is not an adherent of the Plymouth Brethren, as indeed are 90% of the teachers who work in this centre”.

(…) Here again, it is a problem of method and of the credibility of public action. Fundamentally, when one is imprecise in the facts referred to and when one relies solely on the testimonies of people who have left the groups, one cannot elaborate a just assessment of the facts at issue or carry out a rigorous administration of proof, which is particularly necessary in an inquiry which, devoid of the guarantees proper to judicial procedure, may nevertheless call into question the honour of persons.

(…) New religiosities, at least in our country, and non-conventional social practices are coming into being. Confronted with such a diversification of our spiritual and philosophical landscape, it is essential for us not to confuse “non-conformism” and “dangerousness”, and consequently to distinguish original social practices from risky practices.

(…) In conclusion, I should like to underline an essential paradox from the point of view of the action of the public authorities. I very much fear that the stigmatisation of movements such as the Lubavitch or the Plymouth Brethren risks facilitating the passage to the act of people who will find it easy to cloak themselves in an anti-cult good conscience to justify their acts of malice or their antisemitic acts. In this respect, we are seeing an increase in assaults against the Jehovah’s Witnesses; in other words, I very much fear that this stigmatisation, this type of denunciation, may in the long run constitute disturbances of public order or at the very least manifestations of intolerance with regard to one of the most fundamental freedoms of every man and every citizen, freedom of conscience.

GFenech: (…) I believe that today, after having heard you, we may say here that you are going to confirm to us that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are the fifth religion of France. (…) And I ask you, but then very clearly, for I believe the moment is very important, whether you are indeed telling us that today the administration has no grievance against the Jehovah’s Witnesses such as to refuse them the status of a religious association, on the same footing as any religion.

DLeschi: (…) The said associations today are entirely in conformity with tax law, since they have the benefit of the law on religious associations. Certainly there is a past tax dispute between the State and the Jehovah’s Witnesses; there is no present dispute over these manual gifts.

GFenech: (…) So, Monsieur Leschi, I have not been mistaken in my interpretation of your presentation of your founding text today?

DLeschi: (…) Mr Chairman, I am ready to examine everything, but I see today no file showing a disturbance of public order (…) I asked the MIVILUDES to try to assemble these elements of proof of disturbances of public order, for example by questioning the ARH [5], the hospital directors, to know whether, for example in the case of a refusal of blood transfusion, there would be an impediment to the functioning of the public hospital service. I have none, so I am not going to invent a disturbance of public order, which what is more would be severely penalised by the judge — I know you will be sensitive to that — when no substantiated file has been brought forward.

GFenech: We have heard here young Jehovah’s Witnesses, young adults who recounted to us their path of psychological confinement. You know as well as we do what the social treatment of the minor is within the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who cannot take part in a certain number of secular events, who lives between the Kingdom Hall and his family and who, from a certain point of view that has been set out to us here, does not correspond to international norms, notably that of the New York convention on the rights of the child, which requires that the child be raised and educated so as to attain a critical spirit in order to make of him a free citizen. Does that form part of the problem such as may constitute a disturbance of public order in the eyes of your administration?

DLeschi: (…) You know very well that these are extremely difficult and delicate questions (…) As regards freedom of conscience and the right to educate one’s children according to the values one wishes to transmit, you know very well that there is always an assessment that can be very different depending on the person. There was a time when one could explain that someone who adhered to a communist movement was stripped of his personality and that, when he left it, he had the feeling of an extreme pain since those former comrades refused to speak to him. When I was a student in political science, there was a work (…) which was called “the cult” about the communist party and which was written by a sociologist (…) who is called Marc Lazar. There you are, all that is a question of assessment.

PVuilque: (…) I am, I weigh my words, scandalised by what you have said, because you speak of the disturbance of public order and you have raised the fact that a certain number of associations and other people fighting against cult organisations would themselves be liable to take part in disturbances of public order by stigmatising a certain number of organisations.

Martine David: (…) I find it hard to understand that you give the feeling of being totally impervious to the testimonies that have been delivered to the MIVILUDES on several occasions by adherents who have left the various Jehovah’s Witnesses movements or others. (…) Whereas we have already had for many years established testimonies which of course must be taken with caution, like any testimony. (…) Can one consider that you have had no knowledge of these testimonies, ever — that is the first question I put to you (…) I am not calling you personally into question (…) but that means that for a long time the bureau of religious affairs has been malfunctioning, or else there are other weak links, if I dare say so; but one cannot all the same allow it to be said that these former adherents invented everything, that it comes out of their imagination, and that nothing is possible (…) I should very much like, Monsieur Leschi, that with us from time to time you would agree to doubt as to the true respect for the rights of the children who are in cults such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Scientology, and that you would agree to look this reality in the face (…) there are all the same a certain number of thousands of children in France for whom the right to life in society, the right of access to education in all its fullness and flourishing, is not respected; so on that, can we discuss or not?

DLeschi: (…) If your commission substantiates a case for the prosecution with precise, systematic elements, proofs which what is more could be transmitted to the judges for possible proceedings (…) for the moment nothing precise has ever been put forward these last years. You speak of the local commissions; obviously the reports come up, each time all that comes up, I observe the imprecision.

Martine David: (…) Will you agree to consider that we are not inventing all this, that it is the reality? (…) is that too something you are willing to look in the face, and that perhaps it explains why certain elements of information have a little difficulty coming up, because there are testimonies from former adherents who have difficulties in initiating legal proceedings — that is obvious; that does not for all that mean that nothing happened.

DLeschi: (…) I believe it is difficult for the Ministry of the Interior as a ministry to substitute itself for individuals in order to make files which incriminate other people; that is not its function, I remind you. Moreover, there are institutions that are made for that. If the Children’s Defender, who exists, who has been put in place, for example, sends me a file (…) and the file is substantiated, well then it will be taken into account.

Alain Gest: (…) You arrived here in an extremely defensive frame of mind, that is the least one can say (…) and I leave you to measure the tremendous draught that this kind of announcement is going to create as regards other movements, once the press present here has brought to general knowledge what you have just indicated.

DLeschi: (…) I am perhaps a little sharp, it is in my nature, but also because very often I know how to hear and to listen, and I clearly saw that on the Jehovah’s Witnesses there was an almost systematic calling into question, and sometimes in extremely violent terms, on the part of certain of your colleagues, of my bureau’s action and of my own in particular. So allow me, for once … I am here before you and so … I am answering it.

GFenech: (…) Never has the Conseil d’État said that the Jehovah’s Witnesses did not disturb public order and were to be considered as a religion in their own right! Never!

DLeschi: (…) One of the criteria for granting the benefits of the 1905 Act is precisely that there be no disturbance of public order (…) For 10 years we gave as grounds for the refusal of the benefit of articles 200 and 238 to the Jehovah’s Witnesses associations the explanation that they constituted a disturbance of public order. Several times, the Conseil d’État told us: “No, erroneous assessment by the prefectural authority.” That is called case law (…) as for me, as a secular administration, I pass no judgement on beliefs.

AGest: (…) We know very well that there is a smokescreen organised around religious belief, because it is obviously the means, precisely, of rejecting possible accusations (…) You are entering into the discourse of those who tell us: “There is no problem of religion, of cults in France, there is no problem.” (…) All these people are fabulators, nothing ever happened, the Solar Temple is a nice joke.

DLeschi: (…) All religions, all activities of this type, are liable to dérives sectaires. I think that assessment simply by list is an assessment which narrows the focus and which avoids questioning what a dérive sectaire really is and the fact that it is not confined to this or that movement. I am not saying that there cannot be any among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, that is not what I am telling you. I am telling you that stigmatisation on the basis of a criterion which is simple membership does not make it possible to advance the question, and moreover that is why the MIVILUDES had been made to evolve towards the notion of dérive sectaire and not to confine itself simply to a problem of lists.

DLeschi: (…) For the moment I observe that there is systematically imprecision of the facts. Impossibility of putting forward court decisions, and I am not entitled to substitute myself for this absence of proof.

[1] Chabad-Lubavitch (or Chabad Lubavitch), also known under the names Chabad, Habad or Lubavitch, is one of the most important branches of Hasidic Judaism and one of the largest Jewish movements in the world, particularly in the USA and in Israel.

[2] Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

[3] Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

[4] Association des VIctimes de la Fusion AXA UAP. (AXA and UAP insurance, world no. 1 in insurance)

[5] Agences Régionales d’Hospitalisation

Professor Marcel Rufo: Hearing of 19 October 2006

Commentary and selected extracts

Marcel Rufo is a paediatrician and child psychiatrist, director of the “maison de Solène” (the children’s house of the Cochin hospital in Paris)

Field experience (1,500 adolescents pass through his centre each month). He has a concrete relationship with children and pronounces himself in favour of education, of information, and of a reform of National Education to integrate into it alternative medicine and the various non-conventional approaches to the treatment of physical and psychic illnesses.

He seems however to know only superficially the “cult phenomenon” and the way it is treated by the parliamentarians questioning him. Thus the only example with which he has personally been confronted is the existence of a website promoting anorexia, which, as a practitioner having to treat this “illness”, he likens to a dangerous “dérive sectaire”. Although Monsieur Rufo advocates an approach of education and transmission of knowledge and shows himself prudent in the criticism he is invited to make, notably of practitioners of alternative care methods, he nevertheless happens to feed the mill of repression by going along with those who question him in an often very slanted manner. If his vision of education seems open and progressive, the same is not true as regards spiritual education, where he does not seem to recognise the role and value of a teacher, saying that he would “readily stop” him if he came to manifest himself. This contradiction cannot fail to surprise.

He begins with a long exposition of what anorexia is: “an illness of the image of oneself (…) 1% of the adolescent population is affected, 41% is interested.” He explains that the anorexic passes from the solid, to the liquid, to the aerial.

MRufo: ”(…) I asked myself the question whether a site on the net could not be a possible dérive sectaire concerning an extremely vulnerable and fragile public that adolescents are and their capacity, more brilliant than adults’, to go and take information from this mode of dissemination of knowledge.”

”(…) I found these pro-anorexic Internet sites, associated with pro-satanic sites, extraordinarily astonishing (…). It is the first time (…) that someone accentuates the subject’s pathology (…), that one says: “Here is how you must do it so that you become ill”, which is a veritable dérive sectaire: “Here is how you must do it to join the group, the cult of the anorexics”.”

”(…) One cannot discuss the interest of the net (…) but a key word on the net is “isolation”. The net is a masked image which allows adolescents, especially the most fragile, to communicate on messenger. It is a disorder of communication and of the virtuality of contact: for the 10% of adolescents who are doing badly, I want to specify, one is not speaking of those who are doing well, that is 90% of adolescents who use the net much better than we do. When a psychiatrist speaks, he speaks of what concerns him, he is not doing sociology. But those who are doing badly find there a means of isolation instead of contact. It is to confuse the tool of communication with contact. These sites are purely dangerous, like hashish. If the adolescent is vulnerable, it is going to open the way to his pathology.

(…) I was very affected by these sites which demolish all therapeutic and preventive action (…).”

GFenech: “If we had not heard you, we would have missed this aspect of things, which does not emerge from the usual alerts of the associations about this danger of the use of the net as a tool of communication and which in reality becomes a mode of isolation. And you also tell us of an influence tending to a dérive sectaire when it is a matter of entering into a pathology or even of valorising it. What you are speaking of, is it Internet sites or blogs?”

M. Rufo’s preoccupations are legitimate as to the way the Internet may be used by adolescents and diverted by certain people. But we criticise this attempt by the commission to hook onto the expression “dérive sectaire” everything which is or resembles a deviance, in order to give body to a “cult” phenomenon which is not sociologically justified. The only sociological reality today about which one must be concerned is the one which consists in feeding a psychosis about an alleged social scourge of dérives sectaires.

MRufo: “God knows I defend techniques of the sophrology type, of the relaxation type in the treatment of anorexias. I had the good fortune of being able to recruit into my service the first sophrologist of the Paris hospitals. (…) So it is not at all an attack (…) on all that the sophrologists and relaxation practitioners have demonstrated in these techniques. It is more the idea that this type of meeting gives sanction to sick people and drives them deeper into a denial of their illness.”

JP Brard: “Professor, what you say is most interesting. (…) Sophrologist, relaxologist,… How do you distinguish the wheat from the chaff? Are there diplomas? Because there are naturopaths, there is this, there is that, so in this offering, how do you identify what is not adulterated?”

MRufo: “You have had at the National Assembly much animation about the diploma of psychotherapists. (…) I believe that the people who accept a control by a fairly general organisation, bringing together the whole body of professionals, who accept the control and who doubt themselves, are the wheat. (…) A homeopath who believed only in homeopathy in cancerology is dangerous, although he has a diploma of doctor of medicine. On the other hand a homeopath who thus avoids a multiplication of paraclinical care simply by understanding the subject’s anxiety, that is still the wheat.”

JP Brard: “Sophrologists are not organised into constituted professions, where the body of sophrologists would authenticate precisely the wheat…”

MRufo: “To organise the new professions in a university manner would certainly be an answer to your question. (…) the idea would be to organise, through teaching, through the faculties of medicine since it is a matter of care, with the association of physiotherapy schools, the association of speech-therapy schools, of educators, of nurses… There is there a corpus of new professions with people who are particularly competent and particularly determined, which could also enter into a nomenclature, a precision, an order, and which would allow this care with bodily mediation which seems to me essential, apart from the strange Australian woman I was citing just now.”

JP Brard: “So, Professor, it is in the making, but if the profession does not organise itself, there is a strong risk that the rate of charlatans will be a little high…”

MRufo: “Yes, but there are charlatans everywhere, there are psychiatrists who are charlatans…”

JP Brard: “Even in the political field…”

Let us pursue M. Brard’s reasoning. Charlatans in the health field are cult gurus in the making. Could the “political” charlatans or those of other circles be called cult gurus as well? That is not improbable, since the accusation has already flown on all sides. These words have become terms of exclusion, synonymous with delinquent persons or groups, and they are in the process of turning into insults which people will end up throwing at each other in order to discredit one another.

What sensible public debate can be based on words “degraded” in this way?

JP Brard: “We who have been working on cults for some time, most of us here, to preserve individual and collective freedoms — does the description you make not put a finger on a new reality, a kind of virtual cult which uses today’s potentialities where in the end the guru is not visible, but he exists and he holds sway (…)”

JP Brard: (…) One never sees one’s persecuting guru, so for us that may be a field: looking in there at what leads to social rupture, family rupture, at the money circuits, etc.”

(…)

MRufo: “I entirely agree with you, all the more so as a successful cult is a mysterious cult, with keys of entry. And admit that the net is a marvellous tool for perverse use (…) with a possibility that the mystery creates the guru, and the guru benefits from being a masked guru. Immobile, unreachable, and always sought after. (…) With of course the guru’s apostles who are, for their part, visible, in relation to an initiation they are said to have received from someone unreachable, virtual. The guru is virtual, and virtuality permits pathology.”

A few years ago, one spoke of cults, then one spoke of dérives sectaires, then of doings of a cult character; recently the MIVILUDES gave an opinion on a Parisian association, expressing that its doings “resembled” doings of a cult character. One now speaks of the virtual cult. It is very curious to see how one can give a term (cult) which the partisans of anti-cult discourse have refused to define so many variations. That is what allows the discourse to remain imprecise. In it one describes an elusive “enemy”, difficult to pin down, against which important measures are necessary. If one asks for details about this “enemy” of the Republic (the other European countries in their great majority do not subscribe to the French phobia), one will be answered precisely that one does not know much about it because it is furtive and difficult to apprehend, but one is assured that it is there…

JP Brard: “On the virtual cult and the guru’s possible passage to the act, do you have a reflection on that? Do you have experiences, too?”

MRufo: “Honestly I would readily stop him, the guru, when he came out of his hole. There I apologise for my repressive attitude, contradictory with what I have just said, but I believe that if he reveals himself, I have him (…)”

The law must be applied in case of offences, but there is more than simple respect for the law in these words. There is in M. Rufo’s reply an emotional charge which is characteristic of the subject raised and which is no doubt not unconnected with the national psychosis fed for more than twenty years in France.

Many people speak of cults, of gurus without knowing what they are talking about (we are not speaking expressly of M. Rufo in these remarks). These abstract terms dehumanise the targeted groups and persons, they frighten, and this fear generates reactions such as M. Rufo’s. It would be enough to demystify spiritual minorities, to see and hear the men and women who make them up, to dispel many prejudices. Only from this outlook is it possible to form an opinion about a group. But this outlook is ignored in anti-cult discourse, which considers only manipulators or the manipulated.

Jean-Pierre Machelon: Hearing of 24 October 2006

Commentary and selected extracts

Jean-Pierre Machelon centred his presentation on the proposals of the “commission of legal reflection on the relations of religions with the public authorities”, of which he was the president and which submitted its report to the minister of the Interior in September 2006.

M. Machelon will be contradicted — in a fairly aggressive manner in our view — by several elected representatives who think that the possible financing of places of worship by the town halls — one of the principal proposals of the Machelon report — is an open door into which all the cults are going to rush. Without commenting on the report, which requires a wide debate whose chief pitfall risks being passion, let us remark that before any reform it would be appropriate to return to the spirit of the 1905 Act. Which is not the case today, the slightest accusation of cult discrediting, in the eyes of many, any claim to enter the secular framework, even its most fundamental aspect, i.e. the right to practise one’s religion or belief without being discriminated against.

One of the questions put by the president of the parliamentary commission on cults, Georges Fenech, concerns the notion of public order. According to M. Machelon, his commission’s proposals “go in the direction of increasing the legal means of fighting dérives sectaires”: by simplifying access to religious-association status the State can better control the applicants through the “little recognition”, that is to say the evaluation of movements made by the public authorities in order to grant or not the advantages linked to religious-association status, an evaluation which makes it possible to invoke notably, if necessary, the disturbance of public order. M. Machelon was asked to define how this notion of public order could be made more precise against the cults.

It is interesting to note that this catch-all notion of public order used to discredit spiritual minorities is judged too imprecise, whereas this “imprecision” is certainly its principal advantage from the point of view of those who use it, since public order can thus be invoked without restraint and without the risk of leaving too rigid a framework (for the same reasons it had advantageously been decided not to make the notion of “cult” precise, because the targeted groups would manage to get out of the definition, according to Mme Picard). The demand for the “enrichment” of the notion of public order in the case of cults in fact goes in the direction of an increased discrimination.

Jean-Pierre Brard: ”(…) I should like to know who chose the members of the commission you presided over [Machelon commission], whether you had an opinion to give, incidentally why is there no woman, except the rapporteur, and as to the people heard, by whom were they chosen?”

JPMachelon: ”(…) The members of the commission were chosen by the Minister… [editor’s note: the people heard] I chose them in full agreement with the members of the commission.”

JPBrard: ”(…) We who take an interest in cult questions — immediately a question comes to mind, which is that you chose people representing cults: M. Pons [editor’s note: spokesman for the Jehovah’s Witnesses], M. Picq [editor’s note: President of the National Union of the Plymouth Brethren], and someone who is well known for his proximity to Scientology, M. Jacques Robert [editor’s note: Professor of public law, Paris II], but you did not hear victims of cults. Is there not there an imbalance in the sense of the equity which one may think ought to preside over the work of so important a commission — that is to say, to hear people whom we are trying to combat? (…)”

JPMachelon: ”(…) No I do not think so, (…) personally I do not pronounce on the point of knowing whether this or that person may have such proximity, to take up your expression, Monsieur le député, with cults; it seemed to me necessary to hear those who, by the functions they have exercised, by their knowledge of public law, can bring much to the knowledge we needed to acquire of the problems of religions. As regards the Jehovah’s Witnesses we considered that it was not absurd to hear them. To hear them does not mean to approve everything they told us (…)”

This exchange sums up by itself the frame of mind in which the members of the commission on cults conducted their work. To listen to victims, not to listen to spiritual minorities, not to listen to those who do not see themselves as victims. We in our turn put a question: who chose the members of the commission on cults and the people heard, and on what criteria? Why were the principal “accused” not heard?

Let us note nevertheless that the Machelon commission was carried out behind closed doors, as moreover were the first two commissions of inquiry into cults. This habit of doing in secret what belongs to the public domain does not favour dialogue and an approach of knowledge, and is a source of most damaging tension. This very French culture of secrecy is anti-democratic.

(…)

Jacques Myard: ”(…) I have a personal question to put to you, you are free not to answer it (…), it has been said about you, perhaps with polemics and unfounded criticisms, that you are said to be very close, shall we say, to religious associations with a strong connotation of faith; so I do not put fundamentalist because I do not know you sufficiently to describe you so (…)”

A person with an unrecognised spiritual approach is suspect. This flagrant contradiction with the content and spirit of the 1905 Act is nevertheless the rule. This suspicion is equivalent to a rumour which can swell as far as the accusation of cult.

JPMachelon: ”(…) We sought to make the status of religious associations more attractive (…) French law knows only worship, that is to say the ritual aspect, and it does not have to define religion (…)”

JMyard: ” (…) We are going to finance Scientology, so be it (…)”

When one speaks of cults, one systematically evokes the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientology. Must one recall that even if the conflation is more or less tacit, the discrimination affects the whole of spiritual minorities? This reduction of the question to 2 or 3 movements which are presented as scarecrows is a way of avoiding the question of the place of spiritual minorities in French society. Do these minorities ask as a priority for financing? Let us wager that they would content themselves with a respect for spiritual freedom in conformity with the 1905 Act and with our constitution.

(…)

JPBrard: ”(…) You preferred to hear representatives of the administrations of religions, but you propose that all citizens pay [editor’s note: proposal for the financing of places of worship by the town halls]; so those who do not recognise themselves in a religion — why did you not hear them, since they are taxpayers like the others, and you are already instituting a discrimination at the moment of reflection? Secondly, it would interest me to know (…) for example what was the opinion of M. Jean-Paul Willaime [editor’s note: Director of studies at the EPHE] who was a member of your commission?” JPMachelon: “I cannot report back to you the remarks of the commission’s members on each subject (…)” JPBrard: ”(…) In your commission you had M. Jean-Paul Willaime who very clearly took up the cause of the United States against France concerning positions on cults and who attacked with violence the work of French parliamentarians, which is his right, but which did not necessarily qualify him to take part in a commission whose vocation is to formulate proposals for France (…)”

The Republic trains internationally recognised academics who are discredited by certain bodies of that same Republic. These academics, specialists in religions, do not share, in their great majority, M. Brard’s view of the question of cults, which in his opinion renders them unfit to take part in a commission working for France. In what way does an anti-cult position make one more fit to work for France? It is assuredly a curious conception of democratic debate.

(…)

GFenech: ”(…) The Jehovah’s Witnesses claim more than 140,000 publishers (…) This figure of 140,000 which is often put forward — have you been able to verify it? (…)” JPMachelon: ”(…) These are orders of magnitude (…)” GFenech: ”(…) What are your sources, (…) is it an RG source, Jehovah’s Witnesses?” JPMachelon: ”(…) No, no, I did not question the RG, we drew on publications (…) which specialists in religions find easily (…)” GFenech: ”(…) No privileged sources? Because you know that the Jehovah’s Witnesses claim nearly 250,000 members in France?” JPMachelon: ”(…) Whether they are 250,000 or 140,000, the problem is the same (…)”

The fight against cults began 20 years ago. The absence of figures is glaring in every domain: populations concerned, delinquency etc… It is on these imprecisions that the French anti-cult arsenal has been built and that the hypothesis of the social scourge is maintained.

(…)

GFenech: ”(…) For example case law has admitted that a monumental construction — one sees the affair I am referring to [editor’s note: Mandarom] — a monumental construction on a protected site and the refusal to destroy it constitutes an infringement of public order (…) at the same time the refusal of blood transfusions is not considered an infringement of public order, so one asks oneself questions: what is the scale of values between a construction and a child’s health (…)? We are in the midst of questioning (…) and we come with you, Professor, to the last hearing of our commission (…) and we still do not know today why our administration does not respect a scale of values (…)?” JPMachelon: “Because the notion of public order is appraised locally; that is the only answer one can give to your question. Public order is not appraised in itself, it is appraised on a given ground at a given time and according to the judgement of a given person; one may regret it but that is how it is.”

It is interesting to note that as early as 5 September 2006, M. Fenech himself had given, during Chantal Lebatard’s hearing, the government’s legislative answer (2002 law) concerning blood transfusions for children in an emergency. The invocation of a disturbance of public order on this subject at the end of the hearings is therefore surprising.

The will to remove spiritual minorities from ordinary law by defining a priori for them what the disturbance of public order would be (notably by incorporating into it the New York convention on the protection of children) is significant of the parliamentarians’ efforts to establish a two-speed justice to the detriment of these minorities.

The surprise visit by deputies of the commission to the “twelve tribes” community:

Following the hearings, a number of the commission’s deputies made a surprise visit to the community of Tabitha’s place at Sus-Navarrenx near Pau. This visit is said to have been planned long in advance, rather as one prepares a media coup. The media coverage of the visit is indeed striking and one cannot help thinking that it comes to fill the factual void of the hearings on the alleged danger run by tens of thousands of children.

Disrespectful phrases are thrown out: one speaks of adults “of rudimentary elocution” who are in charge of education; by way of comparison, those who listen to the commission’s hearings will not necessarily be dazzled by the elocution of certain participants (including among the commission’s members), yet it seems to us more important to listen to the sense of it. One speaks of children who are not capable of rendering the sense of what they read, just after the visit, therefore without taking the time for reflection and analysis normal for such an exercise.

This publicising is of a nature to divert listeners’ attention onto a particular case, in order to justify measures which will affect all spiritual minorities, and which will be said to correspond to a global situation, worrying for our children. It is our responsibility to ensure that the commission’s results do not end in disinformation.

Read the community’s commentary on the subject of this surprise visit.