There are those who remember and who regret not having done more. “I knew deep down that it was not normal. I thought about it for several years and then I managed to put it aside. I would have liked to understand, I have regrets. I didn’t know it was rape. ” Since 1999 and his appendicitis operation by Doctor Joël Le Scouarnec, Morgane (assumed first name) lived with a heavy burden. But for the vast majority of the more than 350 victims of the former surgeon, memories are not there. Most learned the facts they had suffered during the visit or call of the gendarmes. Some have preferred not to know. Others have never talked to anyone. “I’m a little ashamed. I’m ashamed to say. Only my spouse, my parents and my sister are aware. I haven’t told anyone else, ”said another victim of the one who presented as the worst French pedocrimonel at the end of March.
Since the start of the trial before the Morbihan Criminal Court in February, the testimonies of the very many civil parties have not really left room for doubt: yes, even without memories, the victims could have kept consequences of their assault. Many of them mentioned unexplained disorders, depressions, sexual blockages or a fear of the medical environment. “There is no need to remember to suffer from post-traumatic disorders. It is possible to know without knowing, to have memories and to forget them, ”summed up before the Tribunal of Vannes Thierry Baubet, psychiatrist and expert in child psychopathology. Whether they are very young or older, these victims have sometimes alerted their parents to the gestures they had been able to undergo. “Most children’s attackers tell them that they have good reasons to do so,” said the expert to explain the fact that some children have not been listened to.
Even in the case of unconscious patients attacked in the operating room or in the awakening room by the ex-surgeon of 74, “the memory of the body” can play, assures Jean-Marc Ben Kemoun, child psychiatrist and medical examiner. “The body speaks” and “the less we are in the awareness of a painful or stressful event, the more its impact on the body will be strong,” notes the expert.
Symptoms for years
“Even in the event of traumatic amnesia”, of amazement, the victim “cuts the contact but the body is still there, sometimes he can even be undergoing the facts”. Physical symptoms can last for years, even decades, before this “trapped, encysted memory, explodes” when a situation reminds the traumatic event.
In the case of many victims of Joël Le Scouarnec who came to speak before the Morbihan Criminal Court, this revelation will have been a summons by the gendarmes to get to read the notebooks where the pedocriminal meticulously consigned the inflicted abuse. If the former surgeon has recognized all the facts alleged against him, he displays a very selective memory of the facts, explaining that he does not “remember” the assaults imposed on his young patients.
Our file on the La Scouarnec trial
Is there a risk that complainants who did not remember anything “reconstruct” the facts from what they could hear during the investigation or read in the notebooks? If there is, according to the experts, a process of “reconstruction” inherent in the functioning of memory, it generally does not lead to “false memories”, concluded Hélène Romano, psychologist specializing in psychopathology. The trial must continue until the end of May.
