View of the front facade of the Saint Maurice cathedral in Vienne (Isère).
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ALLILI MOURAD / SIPA
The Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (Ciase) received a total of 6,500 calls from alleged victims or witnesses, its president said Wednesday before representatives of religious institutes.
La Ciase had launched for 17 months a call for testimony via a telephone platform in connection with France Victime, which ended on October 31.
A statistical assessment of the data collected was presented by its president Jean-Marc Sauvé, during the General Assembly of Corref (representatives of institutes and religious congregations) which is held by videoconference until Friday.
Most of the calls concern cases dating back more than 40 years
According to him, the people who called the platform "are mostly men", at 62%.
More than 30% are over 70, 50% are between 50 and 69, only 17% are between 30 and 49.
And 2% are under 30, he said.
In 50% of the cases, the events occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, in 18% of the cases in the 1970s, in 12% of the cases in the 1980s, 7% in the 1990s, 3% in the years 2000, 5.7% in the 2010s, detailed Jean-Marc Sauvé.
More than 87% of assaults were committed "on minors".
A small third of them were between 6 and 10 years old, and a large third between 11 and 15 years old.
The adults (13%), especially “young” adults were for a third religious in formation or seminarians.
Other lessons: "in only 14% of cases, a legal complaint was filed", Jean-Marc Sauvé declared, which does not prejudge the follow-up given (classification without follow-up, dismissal, acquittal, conviction ... ).
"Deep need for recognition"
Finally, the place where the attacks were committed were for 34% schools, 21% catechism and chaplaincies and 12% youth movements or summer camps.
Jean-Marc Sauvé considered that there was "today a deep need for individual and collective recognition of the victims and of what they experienced".
A need which "cannot be solved only by the payment of a sum of money especially if it were to be accompanied by the injunction to be silent", he argued.
"We have to continue the work of recognizing our institutional and political responsibility", declared for her part the president of the Corref Véronique Magron.
The Corref and the Conference of the Bishops of France are each working for a recognition - in particular financial - of the suffering of the victims.
A Corref working group thus detailed Wednesday, step by step, the process of "restorative justice" necessary according to it: "recognition of the facts", "apologies and institutional recognition", preventive measures, then "reparation" which must be done “individually and financially”.
La Ciase, which has other work in progress (research on various archives, interviews, study in victimology, study on a sample of 40,000 people, etc.), has planned to submit its assessment and recommendations in the fall of 2021.
In June Jean-Marc Sauvé had made a first provisional estimate - a low range - of the extent of pedocriminality in the Church in France since 1950, claiming that there had been at least 3,000 victims, a figure that he did not rehearse on Wednesday.
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