2023-09-17 16:10:00
At the heart of a controversy in Belgium, Evras, an education course in relational, emotional and sexual life, is the subject of misinformation online, including in France.
“Don’t touch our children”, “Disguised pedophilia”… According to local police figures, 1,500 people gathered on Sunday at the Mont des Arts in Brussels to protest. Their target? The Evras decree, for “education in relational, emotional and sexual life”, voted in the Parliament of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation on September 7.
In recent days, this twice-two-hour course per year intended to answer questions from primary and secondary school students on these sensitive subjects has sparked heated controversy in French-speaking Belgium.
Online, there is a lot of fake news circulating regarding him. The latter describe Evras as a program allowing “organized and trivialized pedophilia”, which would pervert young children.
To the point that eight schools were vandalized this week in Liège and Charleroi, where fires started during the night. “No Evras” tags on several of them were found and Belgian justice opened an investigation for “arson”.
Animation adapted according to age
But what really is this “animation”? In place since 2012, it was until then not systematically ensured due to lack of resources. According to RTBFonly 20% of schools organized these training courses.
“Most often, the topics covered are chosen according to the needs of the children or adolescents: the facilitators will start from the questions that the young people ask themselves and build their animation around these concerns. In all cases, the facilitators provide appropriate answers depending on the age or stage of maturity of the young people encountered”, we can read on the dedicated platform.
The idea is therefore to “give young people the information necessary to become enlightened adults who take responsibility for their health”, specifies the Evras website. There is therefore no question of teaching or practicing the slightest sexual act, as some critics of the program denounce, nor even of consulting pornographic images.
“We are obviously not going to encourage hyper-sexualization among young people, nor create a sexual orientation or gender identity. I read that we were going to ‘teach children to masturbate’, that is completely unacceptable to do fear to parents on this subject”, declared Caroline Désir, the French-speaking Minister of Education, last week on RTBF.
And guide of more than 300 pagesintended for professionals responsible for supervising these workshops, also allows “to mark the Evras interventions carried out with children and young people”.
A controversy that also affects France
However, the controversy has crossed borders. The French rapper Rohff notably shared on X the video of a woman, relating the testimony of a father wishing to leave France following his child, naked, was forced to touch the vagina of a friend ‘school.
And Belgian media denounced obvious disinformation on the part of the artist, especially since the program only concerns Belgium, a petition launched last Monday has nevertheless gained momentum in France.
She asks Gabriel Attal, the French Minister of National Education, “to abolish the Evras law”. It had already been signed by more than 15,500 people this Sunday. Evras, which is not a law but which was the subject of a decree, however has no link with France.
Fake news on this subject is not rare in France. In 2019, a rumor circulating online claimed that a school textbook for CE1 and CE2 classes addressed vaginal, anal and oral penetration, particularly with sex toys.
It was in reality a brochure from Santé Publique France on sexuality intended for adolescents, which was not distributed in primary schools.
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