This morning, the Ministers of National Education and Justice travel to Grenoble to report on the results of the administrative investigation into alleged acts of pedophilia in a school in Villefontaine in Isère. On March 23, the director of this establishment was indicted and imprisoned for aggravated rape and sexual assault on students. “(…) The failures proved to be numerous”, indicated this Sunday Najat Vallaud-Belkacem. This man had already been sentenced in 2008 to a suspended prison sentence for concealment of child pornography.
So in The ParisianClaudine Proust asks the question: “Should we regularly check the criminal records of teachers”?
To answer it, the journalist interviewed Jean-Pierre Olié. “Officially, answers the psychiatrist, pedophilia is not defined as a disease, but as a behavioral disorder. There are very few mentally ill people among pedophiles”.
For this expert, this disorder is most often associated with “psychiatric comorbidities”. Anxiety, emotional insecurity, this malaise prevents them from having normal relationships with adults. “If they also find themselves in a professional context close to children, the passage to the act is facilitated”, he continues.
It is still necessary to distinguish the different profiles of pedophiles. There are those who are suffering from hypersexuality or a lack of sexual energy who try to find compensation by attacking the weakest, underlines in the daily the head of service at Sainte-Anne hospital. The “occasional passive”, for its part, conditions its acting out on the “availability” that it thinks it perceives in the child. He is distinguished in this sense from the sexual predator.
Can we then free ourselves from this state and return to the right path? The least serious cases correspond to those who commit incest, explains Jean-Pierre Olié. “Once the facts have erupted (…), we can work on building a new balance, and it does not recur”.
But for the others, extra-familial pedophiles, “I don’t think we can talk about healing,” he admits. Medicine can help them control their discomfort, he adds, but nothing more. And to conclude: “Hence the importance of not leaving them in contact with temptation”.
