Anti-Sect France: Taking Stock — Part 2 of the CICNS Documentary

This is the second part of « La France antisectes : état des lieux » (“Anti-sect France: taking stock”), a documentary produced by the CICNS, a French association that documents the situation of spiritual minorities in France. This part tests the third parliamentary inquiry report of December 2006, « Enfance volée » (Stolen Childhood) — which claimed 60,000 to 80,000 child victims of sects — against the commission’s own hearings, in which officials cite 192 court files, eight school reports and two foreign-affairs cases. Academics who study the field — the ethnologist Maurice Duval, the historian of laïcité Jean Baubérot and the sociologist Raphaël Liogier — question the premise of the fight against “sectarian aberrations”. The film then gives the floor to members of small communities and to private individuals who recount raids, prosecutions and divorce disputes in which the accusation of belonging to a “sect” was used as a weapon — accounts the documentary presents as the other side of a policy it argues has found no victims.

CICNS documentary — part 2 of « La France antisectes : état des lieux ». (English translation of the documentary published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 16 August 2014. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

Voice: You alluded to two sects. So, one had already made headlines in the past, la Citadelle, and the other I did not know, because indeed they are proliferating. Tabitha’s Place, is that it?

Voice: One parent, when one of his children came back from a course, was astonished by the change in his behaviour. For example, he no longer wants to eat meat.

Voice: The New Age is making its nest in the holy-water font of the churches. Christ there becomes a cosmo-planetary figure, the Virgin a substitute for the White Lady.

Voice: I am saying things very clearly. I think that if you belong to a sect, you can no longer practise this profession.

Voice: If, however, the sect decides that this child must not exist, they will sacrifice him.

Voice: Can one consider that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are not making children infirm, intellectually speaking?

Voice: Things are happening, there are people suffering, there are victims, and faced with that, the State, the government, the country cannot remain a mere inactive observer.

[Interviewer]: Sects, gurus, an insidious and omnipresent danger, victims, children in danger: that is the picture painted by these actors in the fight against sects. Mr Roulet is the current president of a State body inspired by this alarmist vision, the MIVILUDES, the interministerial mission for vigilance and combat against sectarian aberrations.

As we saw in the first part of our documentary, since 1981 the action of the State, supported by regular media campaigns and two parliamentary commissions of inquiry, has led French opinion to embrace a theory that is very marginal in the world, according to which the new expressions of spirituality are supposedly the breeding ground of an out-and-out perversity and delinquency. On 19 December 2006, the publication of the third parliamentary inquiry report, entitled « Enfance volée » (Stolen Childhood), went along the same lines and enjoyed every favour of the media.

Voice: The parliamentary commission handed its report this morning to the president of the National Assembly. A much-awaited parliamentary report: “Enfance volée — minors as victims of sects”. The youngest are cut off from the outside world, manipulated by the gurus or the parents. With 50 proposals to protect minors.

Voice: The finding we have made is an alarming one, on two counts. First, the number of children affected in France by this phenomenon: they number several thousand. It can be estimated at between 60 and 80,000 children.

[Interviewer]: Behind these peremptory statements, there is in reality no proof of the existence of children in danger as a result of supposed sectarian aberrations. Any journalist, on a careful reading of this report or by viewing the commission’s hearings available on the Internet, could have suspected the enormity of a lie commonly accepted for some ten years. A few hours were enough for us to pick out the elements of a parliamentary [inaudible ?]. A small demonstration.

Mr Fenech, president of the commission, on 19 December 2006, the day the report was handed in.

[Fenech]: Given the reports of the interministerial mission, which puts the emphasis on the dangers for children, and given a certain number of reports that were brought to our attention, notably by the judicial authority, we considered that this was where our action had to be directed.

[Interviewer]: Mrs Sancy, representative of the judicial authority, three months earlier, during the hearings.

Voice: We have been quoted the figure of 80,000 children… who are said to be affected by the fact…

[Sancy]: Yes, except that in 2003-2004, when we carried out this survey, we counted 192 files, and not one more. That is it. Opened for a sect-related issue — and even then, direct or indirect. There was even a certain number of files in which the issue was indirect, that is to say, we were not even sure it had a direct influence on what had been called into question.

Voice: You said earlier: there are a hundred or so files “already old”, you said, being followed. And I was wondering about the “already old”. Because “already old”… does it mean there are no new ones, does it mean they drag on and no one gets to the end of them — what does it mean? What was behind your aside there, “already old”?

[Sancy]: It means, indeed, that we observe a great decrease in the number of reported cases.

[Interviewer]: Mr Dupuis, of the sects mission of the Ministry of National Education.

[Dupuis]: We asked the education-authority inspectors which, among these children in danger, were in danger because of sectarian movements. They answered us that there were eight.

Voice: Out of the 19,000 reports to the public prosecutors’ offices… of children in danger, you are telling us, only eight concerned sectarian phenomena. So there, we are entitled to ask ourselves questions. Why this figure, which is thus [inaudible ?]?

[Interviewer]: We believe that we, for our part, are entitled to ask the following question: how is one to explain that the commission never even considered that these figures might quite simply correspond to the reality of the near-non-existence of victims? And there, instead of that, pursued its quest for proof with each ministry.

Hearing of Mrs Françoise Lebihan, of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Voice: Your ministry, your directorate, is not seized of cases involving divorced parents with children moved abroad?

Lebihan: Ah yes, yes, you have some, yes, yes. It is in that capacity that we know these two files, the two files I mentioned to you.

Voice: But no more than two files, you say, concerning sectarian aberrations involving minors?

[Interviewer]: For want of figures, the commission falls back on the media’s usual scapegoats. On that count, the Jehovah’s Witnesses would be cited no fewer than 415 times in the course of the hearings. There again, the rumour would sometimes suffer a few stinging denials. Messrs Dupuis and Polivka, inspectors-general of National Education.

Voice: Never have we had a report from teachers, from pupils’ parents, from elected officials, alerting us to the behaviour of… of Jehovah’s Witness children.

Voice: That kind of thing is indeed not reported.

Voice: Because it seems to us that they are not really in danger.

Voice: Things are happening, there are people suffering, there are victims.

[Interviewer]: There are certainly things happening, but they do not seem to worry the ministries’ observers. There are perhaps victims, but their number does not justify… Looking at this action over the last 25 years, one can even say that if there are no proven victims, it is not for want of having looked for them.

A guide for the public servant faced with sectarian aberrations, distributed throughout all the administrations, sums up the main elements of an apparatus unique in the world. Since 1996, a permanent interministerial mission, the MILS, succeeded by the MIVILUDES. Vigilance and coordination missions within each ministry. A “sects correspondent” magistrate in every court of appeal. Fifty sects correspondents among the investigators of the Central Directorate of General Intelligence. In every prefecture, a vigilance unit on the sectarian phenomenon. Brochures warning against sects in the 1,239 youth information points. A special book on sects for mayors. And at every level of this apparatus, the involvement of the anti-sect associations: the CCMM, Centre against Mental Manipulations, and above all the ADFIs, Associations for the Defence of the Family and the Individual, which are recognized as being of public utility, subsidized to over 90% and to the tune of hundreds of thousands of euros.

So it is this impressive arsenal that proves incapable of detecting more than a few victims of sectarian aberration each year. Mr Leschi, head of the bureau of religious affairs, completes our tour of the ministries and shows that the State’s action sometimes runs up against a civil servant’s plain common sense and ethics.

[Leschi]: If the administrative authorities that were put in place to protect children put together a sufficiently substantiated file that they can pass on to the Minister of the Interior, saying: here, on the basis of all these established facts, of these files, we have a movement whose philosophy means that children are systematically raised in contradiction with the international conventions signed by France — well, we will examine the file. For the moment, I have not seen it; I am not going to invent it; I have no right to substitute myself for this absence of proof.

[Interviewer]: So what feeds the supposed work of the parliamentary commissions of inquiry, of the MIVILUDES and of the subsidized associations mentioned by the State? Do they know those whom they denounce as dangerous?

Voice: But you know, we fully respected the adversarial principle: we sent questionnaires to all the communities concerned, they had every opportunity to answer us, so everything is quite clear.

Voice: So the Jehovah’s Witnesses, contrary to what they say, you say — you talked with them, they were heard?

Voice: But one does not talk with sectarian communities. We take note of their acts when they cross the yellow line, that is to say, republican law.

[Interviewer]: In fact, and following Mr Fenech’s example, the option of not dialoguing with the incriminated persons is a general consensus among the actors of anti-sectarianism. There is another one: that of ignoring the work of the historians of religion, sociologists or ethnologists on the State’s payroll who, for years, have been studying the emergence of the new spiritualities. Yet they proved before our camera that they had things to say about the French situation.

Maurice Duval, ethnologist, who has, among other things, studied the Aumist religion for four years.

[Duval]: Today we are at that period where there are ever greater controls, and the attempt is now made, like Big Brother, to control people’s thoughts, to control people’s belief systems. That is the reason I am fighting against this: because I think it is extremely dangerous socially. And I would say to the MIVILUDES that they are in that very situation, and that they know it well, moreover, despite all the speeches — because when you look at how many people, groups, sects have been pinned by the courts for wrongdoing, for offences, you see that it is derisory compared with the number of groups. Besides, it bothers them, at the MIVILUDES, because they can see very well that there is no object. There is no object.

[Interviewer]: Jean Baubérot, holder of the only French chair on laïcité, an indispensable participant in every French or foreign colloquium on the subject.

[Baubérot]: That there are associations fighting against other groups — that is part of society at large, that is part of freedom of expression. That these associations should be tied to the State, recognized as being of public utility, and able to instrumentalize the State — that is serious, and that is what distinguishes France from the other democracies.

[Interviewer]: Raphaël Liogier, director of the Observatoire du religieux, an institution of the University of Aix-en-Provence.

[Liogier]: Most researchers in the social sciences agree on the diagnosis, on what is happening, on religion, on the new religious movements. There are no serious social-science researchers in France who are afraid of the new religious movements.

[Interviewer]: Few or no victims. A harmless population, according to the academics who study it. And yet, a national mobilization against this population, and the entrenched idea that it represents a major social scourge. What amounts to a genuine psychosis is not without consequences. We invite you to discover the other side of the picture: men, women and children, the unrecognized victims of a genuine repression.

Voice: With the sects, courtesy is not the rule; you have to come by surprise.

[Interviewer]: In December 2006, we went to meet a small Christian community which was then, at its own expense, providing the publicity for the third parliamentary inquiry report on sects.

Voice: Good evening everyone, thank you for your attention, here are the headlines of this Wednesday’s news. The parliamentary commission of inquiry into sects has discovered 18 children living in a closed environment in the biblical community Tabitha’s Place.

[Participant] (member of Tabitha’s Place): So around 9 in the morning, I was starting class with my three pupils. And then a child comes to warn me that there are some gentlemen waiting at the door. I am told that they are people from Parliament. So I let them in and we sit down, we begin to talk together calmly.

[Participant] (member of Tabitha’s Place): I knew that these are parliamentarians who have made the fight against sects, in inverted commas, their hobby-horse. So we knew very well that they would come. I listen to my heart, I say to myself: for ten years we have been asking them to come here to see for themselves and observe for themselves what we are doing, what we are living. How are our children?

[Participant] (member of Tabitha’s Place): So they visited three classes, they briefly asked the children a few questions.

[Interviewer]: The visit would be short. The deputies’ line is very tight that day.

[Participant] (member of Tabitha’s Place): While the parliamentarians were still on our premises, we were already starting to be contacted by the first journalists, who told us that an AFP dispatch had come out, saying that the commission was going to hold a press conference in Paris at 6 p.m.

[Interviewer]: Before leaving, the deputies are invited by their hosts to talk over a drink.

[Participant] (member of Tabitha’s Place): We sit them down in these rooms, here, where we are now, and we ask them what their first impression was. Mr Georges Fenech takes the floor, and he himself tells us — and I regret not having recorded it — because he tells us: “Listen, frankly, we were pleasantly surprised by the welcome you gave us, since we came by surprise, you received us with a smile, you opened your doors without resistance, we found premises that were clean, we found children who were healthy, children who seemed happy, we were even able to observe that they played together, we saw them through the window.”

Mr Georges Fenech, who says that. A few hours later, these gentlemen take the plane and arrive in Paris, and there the picture changes, it becomes something dramatic: they had discovered Natacha Kampusches, children who were asocial, cut off from the world.

Voice: We were shaken, I think there is no point in hiding it. We saw these 18 children given over to a community of psychological confinement. The law does not make it possible to fight this psychological confinement. These children who are cut off from the world.

[Participant] (member of Tabitha’s Place): Cut off from the world? From what world? We are not cut off from the world, insofar as we regularly receive guests, our families; we visit them, we go to fairs and markets; our children themselves travel with us. We are not at all cut off from the world.

[Interviewer]: The label of “sect” is a veritable passport to trouble, a life sentence to the presumption of guilt, even for those who have gone through judicial proceedings and come out of them cleared. Another place, other people, gathered around other convictions, victims of the same collective psychosis.

Voice: I note that there are communities committing sectarian aberrations which may be liable to cause harm. I go there, and I fully intend to go there, and I will go to every département at least.

[Participant] (member of the visited community): I suddenly saw eight people arrive, a camera on someone’s shoulder. I experienced it somewhat like a raid — that is to say, Mr Fenech is quite incisive in his way of introducing himself, in his way of entering. He imposes a relationship a little like that of an investigating judge, if I may put it that way. I do not even know whether I gave permission to film. It was so brutal that I did not realize what was happening.

[Participant] (member of the visited community): There is a gentleman who comes toward me, who introduces himself. I did not quite understand what he was saying to me. He quoted an acronym to me; I heard “ude” at the end, that is all I remember.

[Participant] (member of the visited community): We saw at once that Mr Fenech was really the important person, with his retinue of people around him. I still had this idea that these were really people who had come to conduct an inquiry, so I answered the questions. We did a tour of the property. Questions were asked. Now Mr Fenech, in particular, has stereotyped questions, which come back cyclically. There are always references: whether the children attend school, the notion of “health” and what is proposed as regards health. Then there was something a little peculiar: the questions were very slanted and there was no openness. Each time Éric or Véronique set off onto that ground — that is to say, what is really lived here — they would cut them off, they would ask another question, they would invite one of his collaborators to ask questions. And we sensed that there was irritation, that there was impatience.

[Participant] (member of the visited community): I felt an unease, really. I felt that the answers mattered little to them. The children do not go to school: you are a sect. Your children go to school: well, you are a sect and you are trying to hide behind the fact that your children go to school, it is a cover. So everything is interpreted so as to pursue one precise line. And then came the truly dishonest questions, about the money that Brother [inaudible ?] was earning on our backs.

[Participant] (member of the visited community): As the visit went on, I realized clearly that there was a real bitterness, thinking: but in fact, what we say does not interest them at all. They already have their ideas about what they have come to see and then… Well, above all Mr Fenech. The other people were more respectful.

[Participant] (member of the visited community): Mr Fenech was insinuating that Brother [inaudible ?] is a man… he was a member of the Order of the Solar Temple.

[Participant] (member of the visited community): I was a little frightened and indignant at what this [inaudible ?] insisted on seeing of the work that is done here. It seemed to us perfectly… not false, but worse than that: not fair, really. It does not correspond at all to the spirit of the place.

[Participant] (member of the visited community): There, I have the impression of having been deceived a second time, because I had really trusted this person who was beside me, because she was a something of Le Parisien. A France 2 crew had come to the place with a journalist and a cameraman. We said to ourselves: if it is in the same vein… I called France 2 back to find out what exactly it was about, what it corresponded to and where it was going. She tried to reassure me by telling me that there was an ethics code, that there was nothing to worry about, and so on. Only, the title of the programme was « Les gens portés disparus » (“People Reported Missing”). We decided, in agreement with our lawyer, to refuse the publication of these images, or the broadcasting of these images.

[Participant] (member of the visited community): When we met this lawyer, he told us clearly that the MIVILUDES had no business entering our home as it did, that it was not authorized to do so. And that is the reason letters went out to the prefect. With good right, we could call ourselves “ADFI”: that is to say, if there is an association for the defence of the family and the individual, it is indeed in places like here. That is all we do — defend the family and the individual.

[Participant]: For years I have been saying: come and inspect what is happening, come and see what is happening.

[Participant]: Where it bothers me is that such raids can endanger people who are fragile. They have taken steps with lawyers. Well, I am following this very, very closely. It is important to me, because… because without le Moulin, I do not know what will become of me.

[Interviewer]: The residents of Terranova, a small community we had already mentioned in the first part of our documentary, thus underwent, in December 2000, a particularly violent arrest, mobilizing 80 gendarmes and special intervention forces. After police custody in every respect similar to that of the inhabitants of la Balme, comes the first meeting with the judge and the beginning of a long ordeal.

[Participant] (resident of Terranova): The judge’s first sentence was: “I am putting you in prison, me, and Olivier Manitara. I am going to put you in prison at home.” Confined to my residence, where I no longer have the right to work, no longer the right to go out, and so no right to have any income, since on top of that he had taken all the money I had in my bag. He had frozen all my accounts — well, there you are. So they had made sure that things would go very badly afterwards.

[Participant] (resident of Terranova): To make trouble for us, they decided to take away all our computers, all our accounts, all our client files — that is, the basis of our work.

[Participant] (woman resident of Terranova): When I saw the judge, she did not ask me any questions; she made me understand that I had to leave Terranova. What she wanted me to tell her was that yes, I could leave and go back to living a normal life in a big city.

[Participant] (resident of Terranova): So I was… banished from where I lived. I no longer have the right, legally, officially, to meet the people with whom I lived, with whom I worked, so I no longer have a job. I was not offered one in exchange, but that was not their problem. I am a writer; I have written some thirty books. Truly, writing is my life. They prevented me from writing for eight months. They took away a part of my life.

[Participant] (woman resident of Terranova): Eight months of imprisonment at home, with two children, plus being pregnant, writing numerous letters asking them to try to find a way for me to earn money. At one point I even wrote a letter saying that I wished to go to the Restos du Cœur to have something to eat. That was refused.

[Interviewer]: It should be known that at the end of the judicial proceedings, nothing would remain of the initial accusations of mental manipulation, theft, violence or unlawful confinement, to justify the front pages of the local newspapers. And nothing, in any event, to justify what happened during the investigation period, and in particular the reprehensible turn taken by the gendarmes’ inquiry.

[Participant] (resident of Terranova): They travelled all over France, the gendarmes, all over France, to go and see clients of the Telesma publishing house. And they went to see them, telling them: there you are, you are in a sect. I had distributors: they were sent a file — careful, it is a sect — and they wanted nothing more to do with us. We had booksellers we work with — careful, Manitara is a guru — so they no longer wanted to work with us. So they carried out a whole operation, the gendarmerie, so that everything would pull away from us. And people do not try to find out whether what is put before them is true or not true. For them, from the moment it is put under their nose, for them, it is true. You become a sub-citizen, you become a bad Frenchman, you become a being who must not be helped, who must have spokes put in his wheels. That is a reality.

[Interviewer]: The accused hope that the court hearings will at last bring an equitable confrontation, where they will be able to defend themselves and obtain justice. That expectation is often disappointed by magistrates who seem to lose all rationality when it comes to judging a “sect” case.

Tal Schaller, physician and naturopath, first found himself suspected of belonging to the Order of the Solar Temple and of fomenting a collective suicide. Two days later, all that remained against him were infractions of the hotel-trade regulations, which would be punished in a rather surprising manner. He testifies, as the inhabitants of Terranova have done, that to be accused of being a sect is often to be the powerless spectator of this theatre of the irrational.

[Schaller]: We received not only an extremely high fine, but also a strange penalty, which consisted in forbidding us for five years to organize courses and conferences on anything concerning health and personal development. We went back to court several times, and we always had the impression that the judges were telling us, in effect: “Yes, you are perhaps not a sect, but you are still a sectarian deviance.” With this term “sectarian deviance” you can put in whatever you like, and in a way we were condemned in advance, since we were in a sectarian deviance.

[Participant] (woman resident of Terranova): When they questioned us, when they made us spend I do not know how many — eight or nine hours — standing at the bar, they insulted us as guru, as sect, and they refused to hear anything, anything, truly anything; at one point I was even forced to shout in order to explain. When you are accused of something, in principle, you have a certain time to answer the question. There, it was: “You are accused of this.” I would begin to speak, I would say four words. “Yes, but you are always trying to defend yourself. We know you are a sect. There is no point in proving anything.” So I explain to them that I have papers proving that I am innocent of what I am accused of. “Yes, but that is not true.” The lawyers, at that point, intervene and say that it is outright discrimination.

[Participant] (resident of Terranova): The public prosecutor said that I was a sick person, that I was a guru, that I had organized a sect, that the Telesma publishing house was harmful to society, that I was someone harmful to society. It is frightening, but I am not safe, because those people want to indict me. It is not that I have done something; it is that they want to indict me.

[Interviewer]: These supposed “sect” cases thus reveal no victims of sects, but a few disputes, such as arise in every sector of society, and above all people persecuted for entirely legitimate life choices. This assessment can be extended to 25 years of fighting sectarian aberrations, as Maître Florand and Maître Biro, both lawyers specializing in individual liberties, testify.

[Participant] (lawyer): If there were a citizens’ inquiry — statistical, sociological, judicial — one would realize, first, that there have been very few convictions in the last ten years — practically nothing: one would find about ten. And that of those ten or so, eight or nine of them concern personal misconduct by members belonging to minority groups. So it is indeed a fantasy to think that a delinquency, or a particular criminality, a particular delinquency, that would affect the sects… It is a phenomenon that is non-existent.

[Participant] (lawyer): We equipped ourselves with an enormous arsenal to chase, like a Tartarin de Tarascon, after the wild beast that haunted the public forest. We hardly found any dangerous animals, and we produced disastrous effects in the population, notably this collective phobia that took hold of the country. And behind this collective phobia, a plethora of lawsuits that had no connection with it, such as divorces, where one side accused the other of being in a sect. That is the balance sheet: a totally disastrous balance sheet.

[Interviewer]: The accusation of being in a sect is far more widespread than people think, and it can strike anyone. When a couple separates, it is common to see the wounds generate all kinds of aggression, and the courts of justice become the theatre of the most extreme and most gratuitous allegations. Two testimonies to speak for the hundreds of people who one day found themselves accused of being in a sect, in a divorce dispute.

[Marie-Christine]: I was able to find in myself enough energy to ask my husband for a divorce, something I had wanted to do for years, but he was fiercely opposed to it, and he would not hear of it. He talked about it a great deal to my children, to my eldest sons, who were of age, and they got it into their heads that I must belong to a sect: it was not possible that I should want, of my own accord, to divorce, it was unimaginable, someone must have been putting ideas into my head. And that is when they decided to go and see the ADFI.

[Interviewer]: This turn of events stems from the fact that Marie-Christine, who leaves the family circle only once a week, takes part, among other things, in the activities of an association for meetings and sharing around various books and personal-development techniques.

[Marie-Christine]: So the ADFI played on paranoia, on fear. “You do not realize: your mother — it is not really a sect she is in; she risks meeting extremely dangerous people. So she may be drawn into a sect, so she may draw in your two little brothers” — that is, my two youngest children, who were minors — “and at that point, getting them out of there will be impossible. So to avoid all that, as a preventive measure, it is better to take custody of the children away from her.”

Then the ADFI recommended to my husband a lawyer in Aix-en-Provence, a lawyer who had an enormous tome marked “anti-sect fight”. So he contacted this lawyer, who told him that a fault-based divorce had to be brought in order to take the children away from me. This lawyer said that this was the normal procedure in such cases. The file was going to be put together in such a way that I would not be able to get out of it.

[Interviewer]: Marie-Christine, who cannot leave the marital home — which could constitute a fault in the context of the divorce — must then endure, for long weeks, a genuine persecution.

[Marie-Christine]: They told my children to go through all my personal papers, my diary, my cheque stubs, my address book. They really all turned against me. They attacked me, they even insulted me. I was called a slut, a liar, and more besides. All under the pretext of saving me, because they had been told that I really had to be saved, that I was in serious danger. Trying to discuss any of this with my husband was impossible. He refused all discussion.

There was one of my children with whom I was able to talk — one only. Little by little, I managed to make him understand a certain number of things. As a result, he tried to talk about it to his brothers and to my ex-husband. And at that point, they all called him a traitor. I really felt at one point that I was going to crack, that I was on the edge of madness. Fortunately… there was truly one day in particular when I felt that on that day, if there had not been someone there close to me, someone I could talk to, someone to hold my hand, I was going mad.

[Interviewer]: Where, then, are the victims? Could one not speak, in this instance, of psychological confinement, of mental manipulation or of brainwashing — all things of which the new spiritualities are habitually accused? Marie-Christine’s ex-husband would end up abandoning the proceedings under way. Seized by remorse, but also certainly for financial reasons.

[Marie-Christine]: Knowing all the same that this lawyer had asked for between 10,000 and 15,000 euros for a small fault-based divorce, insofar as it was a difficult file. So, what I understand now: the file must have been mightily difficult, because there was nothing in it. There was absolutely nothing that could accuse me of anything whatsoever.

[Interviewer]: Marie-Christine’s case is not an isolated one, as Christian Paturel, a former lawyer, testifies.

[Paturel]: We would see appearing in the proceedings files from the ADFI — quite substantial files, since they were files about this thick — which were handed to the opposing lawyer, so as to feed the debate.

Voice: The ADFI, which claims to be an association for helping the family and the individual, actually pushed for the destruction of a family and incited aggressiveness and hatred, under the pretext of love. All the values of tolerance, of respect for others, of listening are swept aside, and people are attacked, dragged lower than the ground, and destroyed.

Voice: I have seen files where things could have moved toward a joint divorce, and which suddenly flared up, turning contentious — and you should see it: trench warfare, at the very least.

[Interviewer]: Christine, for her part, had been divorced for eight years when her son, after spending several years with his father, asked to come back and live with her. The ex-husband, disappointed, cannot oppose his son’s wish, since this freedom to come and go freely between the two homes had been established in the divorce judgment. That is when he resorts to the accusation of a sect.

[Christine]: He lodged a complaint with the district court, with the children’s court, stipulating — and here I quote what is written in the judgment — that he had seized the children’s court “by reason of the danger represented in his eyes by the harmful influences of the mother and her circle, by reason of the connections she maintains with a sect”. So, he considered that there was a problem, a danger for his son, and that I had a bad and negative influence on him, because of what I live.

The judge’s decision — I learned it immediately at the end of the interview. He said to me: “Listen, I have heard your son, I have heard you; I see absolutely no danger in your son being with you; you are not in a movement that appears dangerous, so I am dismissing this case.”

[Interviewer]: Christine, no more than Marie-Christine, did not belong to the spiritual minorities that sometimes make the media’s front pages. She has no communal life, but a very conventional professional and social life. She was thus far from imagining that she could find herself accused of being in a sect.

[Christine]: I have a perfectly healthy life, a perfectly normal life: I work, I eat normally, I look after my health normally, I think for myself, I am not indoctrinated, I do not hand over my salary to goodness knows whom.

[Interviewer]: The ex-husband, unhappy with the dismissal, goes on to lodge a complaint directly with the public prosecutor.

[Christine]: And one day I received — oh surprise — a summons to the police station near my home. I found myself in an office, as in the films: behind a table, with a gentleman typing on his machine, a tiny room, with nothing on the walls. I immediately felt placed in the position of a guilty person. Immediately. And at one point another person arrived, very exasperated, very worked up. He was looking for his cigarettes — well, his lighters, or I do not know what. And then he starts saying to me: “Yes, but you know, people like you, who are in sects — we know, they all function the same way, we know them, we are used to it.” So he asked me several questions: he asked me how I earned my living, how I ate, whom I associated with, how I looked after my health, whether I took medicines. Whether I took drugs.

[Interviewer]: Christine would have to wait several months, without any word from the judicial system, before being summoned again by the judge. Her son having in the meantime decided to return to his father, Christine would then obtain from her ex-husband the withdrawal of his complaint.

For people concerned by alternative life choices, a feeling of oppression can easily grow on hearing these testimonies. It is a reflection of the daily life of those accused of being a sect.

Voice: Living our life in France is difficult.

Voice: From the moment you become a target of the media, it is something you have to endure. It is not trivial. You are laid bare.

[Interviewer]: Within this so-called fight against sects, one often encounters genuine contempt for people’s deepest aspirations. That explains the cynicism of an action that leaves deep wounds behind it.

Voice: Now there is a real destruction. That is to say, I cannot manage to feel trusting with my children. There is no question of my managing to talk to them again about my private life, or about what I think, about what interests me. I keep that to myself. My birthday — I can no longer manage to celebrate it with them.

Voice: I went into an enormous depression afterwards. I was really lost. If I had not had my belief in God, if I had not had prayer and all that, in my opinion, I would have committed suicide. I say it frankly, because everything was collapsing around me. I felt they were on me when I had nothing to reproach myself with, when I could not even explain myself.

Voice: When I was arrested, it was so violent that… I never got over it. I spent three months in hospital, where I gave birth to the baby two months early. I gave birth to a premature baby. It was quite difficult to find normal sleep again in my flat. It leaves a much deeper mark than people think.

[Interviewer]: Hundreds of people have lived through similar situations over the last 25 years, amid general indifference. In a short time, the CICNS has put together a detailed, name-by-name dossier. We denounce the persecutions of a discriminatory policy that is perpetuated without any serious justification. A few individual aberrations have been used for 25 years by the media and certain public authorities in order to keep up a hunt against spiritual minorities which has caused much suffering in our population. The flagrant injustice of such a situation could quickly become the shame of our society if the springs of this dramatic misapprehension are not exposed in broad daylight, so as to move the debate toward more wisdom and intelligence.