The New 2010 MIVILUDES Guide: The Politics of Fear

The New 2010 MIVILUDES Guide: The Politics of Fear

By CICNS (October 2010)

Guide: “The protection of minors against dérives sectaires”

Georges Fenech, forever ill at ease with legal terminology, treats us to a brand-new expression (“movements carrying dérives sectaires”) on the very first page of this new MIVILUDES “guide”. He then immediately follows it with a question that illustrates this outfit’s habitual language games: “Who can tolerate a child being sexually abused, mistreated, deprived of care, or of an education that would allow him to become a free citizen?”. This rhetorical question goes unanswered, the answer being subliminal, generated in the imagination of readers who are meant to have understood perfectly well where the tormentors of children are to be found. Just as “a silent national tragedy” is meant to stir emotion in every household.

The opening pages of this “guide” are striking for the repetition of an intention that is more alarming and ever more clearly displayed:

Taking account of risk and no longer only of an established situation

p. 17: “Taking the dérive sectaire into account from the standpoint of risk, and no longer only of established danger, must play a central role in the prevention and anticipation of a potential danger to minors.”

p. 14: “The situation of a minor in danger is therefore not limited to established cases of ill-treatment but entails taking account of a potential risk within the framework of a necessary prevention”.

Every police excess and every obstruction of individual liberties is thus legitimised by this kind of statement, which nonetheless meets with little objection in our country, progressively conditioned to surrender its hard-won gains, as is the case in most Western countries since the beginning of the 21st century.

p. 18 The point is hammered home: “The notion of dérive sectaire (is) at once inscribed within the field of judicial intervention and consistent with the priority given to prevention.”

A rough diagram on p. 19 lends a faintly scientific air to these battering-ram tactics and makes it possible to simplify the message for the general public: the dérive sectaire must be detected before it exists (even though on page 74 (that is, very far into the “guide”) it is quite rightly recalled: “Stick to the facts, basing oneself on the elements liable to harm the minor within the meaning of article 375 of the Civil Code”. One may also savour p. 77: “While the notion of dérive sectaire may serve to give meaning to scattered indications which, without it, would not be significant, it must not be substituted for the objective analysis of those indications.”).

p. 20 The dilemma of the practitioners of France’s crude brand of anti-cult ideology is rather delicious in what it reveals of the anomaly of the French situation: “An individual under mental hold will assert that their adherence is entirely voluntary and that there is no form of submission involved. Such a discourse may on occasion disturb the work of the various child-protection actors”. We could not have defined the problem of their action better ourselves, nor with such assumed indecency.

More little drawings on p. 21 serve to show clearly that the “quest for meaning” makes one vulnerable, and that “human warmth”, the “cultural, the spiritual and the therapeutic” will seize the opportunity to fall upon you and destroy you (two tables are devoted to the forms of that destruction, among them: “the follower believes he is consenting freely” and adopting “a new ethics in place of the old ones”.)

The guide then labours to define, in a relatively confused manner (always the problem of legality, MIVILUDES’s action being always at the margin of democratic action, with stylistic precautions that contradict the obvious intention of unrestrained repression), the indications of dérives sectaires suffered by the child, at school, in the family, in an association, more or less everywhere. Key questions are set out to help detect the risks. Some questions, highly repetitive and incantatory, are commonplaces: legitimate questions one ought to ask about a child in all circumstances, and not only within spiritual minorities. Others are repetitions of the “indications of dérives sectaires” copied and pasted from the ADFI, whose list we shall spare you, and others are quite simply abusive in a country governed by the rule of law. These questions, taken separately from one another, can only arouse suspicion towards activities or personal choices that are perfectly normal and acceptable:

Has the adolescent abruptly changed his behaviour, or even his manner of dress? Does he systematically refuse to associate with friends who do not share his views? Is he asking for more pocket money? Do his significant behavioural changes coincide with meeting an adult during a course, a voluntary, associative or sporting activity; or with his joining a new group of friends unconnected with his usual circle?

Here again, the increasingly official tendency to detect risks before they have manifested finds clear expression. The monitoring of home schooling likewise takes up several pages, recalling the very recent restrictions (2007 and 2009) placed upon it, always “thanks” to the anti-cult campaign.

p. 80 A case is cited in which an expert’s failure to detect a “cult” problem is attributed to the fact that this “expert appointed to gather the children’s testimony (…) in the absence of prior training, fails to diagnose the risk of dérive sectaire.”

p. 63, MIVILUDES raises “certain recurrent pitfalls” to be avoided in the manner of “apprehending the cult phenomenon”, two of which strike us as both pertinent and amusing (since on their own they could call the entire anti-cult campaign into question). According to MIVILUDES, one should therefore take care not to:

• Dramatise the context (“He perceives things excessively, as though in a magnifying mirror”);

• Give way to fascination (“It is not uncommon for certain families to display an apparent openness and to extend a warm welcome to the social-work professional.”)

In conclusion, MIVILUDES’s editorial style always walks a tightrope. It strives to respect legality while working to induce latent, potential threats and possible risks. It then becomes quite easy to point the finger at anything and everything in order to find there the famous “potential risks” (for want of having found enough real risks to date?). This guide as a whole is alarming in the confusion it generates in the reader, in the conflation of real threat with the need for prevention in non-existent situations, in its insistence (for years now) on presenting the healthiest and most legitimate behaviours (a quest for meaning, a change of opinion, a change of way of life) as signs of danger, prompting the population towards denunciation and towards fear in every situation of daily life. Long sections of the guide are moreover devoted to explaining “how to make a report” to the “competent” authorities, which would constitute legitimate technical information were it not resting on dozens of pages glorifying rumour, the commonplace, fear of one’s neighbour and of everything new. Nothing new in this painful reading of the drift of a policy not only doomed to failure in its approach to human behaviour, but which is on the way to arousing more and more irrational fears and injustice in our country.