Professional Training Bodies and Cults: the Usual Fanciful Figures of the MIVILUDES

CICNS (February 2012)

The MIVILUDES recently published a guide, « Savoir déceler les dérives sectaires dans la formation professionnelle » [1] (“Knowing how to detect dérives sectaires in professional training”), which has “the ambition of helping all the actors (…) to spot and to fight against” cult-related “at-risk situations”.

Nothing in this guide, apart from the president of the mission’s rule-of-thumb estimates, makes it possible to detect the reality of the supposed “danger” of “at-risk situations” justifying the drafting of this guide.

On page 31 we read that “the control campaign initiated by this instruction of August 2010 [of the DGEFP] on behavioural personal-development training, in the strict sense of the term, revealed (…) 40 cancellations of declarations of activity, the services not constituting training actions (that is, 26.92%).”

40 cancellations representing 26.92% of the whole suggest that the control bore on about 150 bodies, that is, 0.3% of the total number of existing training bodies (50,000). On what study (whose reference is not given) does Georges Fenech then rely to assert noisily in the press: “Between 1,200 and 1,500 professional training bodies are said to be linked to a cult group” [2] or “suspected of dérive sectaire”?[3]

Cross-checking various estimates, we arrive at this calculation:

Page 3 of the MIVILUDES guide: “Today, more than 50,000 training bodies, achieving in total 7 billion euros of turnover, train each year more than 11 million trainees and dispense nearly 750 million hours of training.”

Page 4: “Of all the training courses offered, 20% belong to the ‘behavioural’ or to ‘self-development’. Now, it is precisely in this domain that the cult risk can often be the greatest, together with that of health, by way of non-conventional practices with a therapeutic aim.”

20% of 50,000 represents 10,000 training bodies.

On the MIVILUDES website[4], the number of training bodies rises to 60,000, doubtless an update since the guide’s publication on 8 February 2012: “The share of so-called behavioural training whose content is open to question and/or linked to a movement of cult origin is estimated today at 10%. The training offer in the domain of health and non-conventional practices with a therapeutic aim (PNCAVT) is also growing constantly, combining a pseudo-medical jargon with a promise of gratifying remuneration, whose risks for trainees, in terms of mental hold, are real. In total, between 1,200 and 1,500 professional training bodies, of the 60,000 recorded in France, are said to be linked to a group of cult character.”

20% of 60,000 represents 12,000 training bodies, and 10% “whose content is open to question and/or linked to a movement of cult origin” represents 1,200 bodies. The president of the MIVILUDES specifying that these are only estimates, why not round up to 1,500, indeed…

Thus one sees, more and more often, these slapdash calculations of the MIVILUDES echoing through the media and becoming “gospel truth”, without any serious study coming to corroborate them.

Bernard Dréano, head of the controls organisation mission of the DGEFP, declared at Levallois on 18 November, concerning the controls carried out in 2011[5], that “despite the announcements of certain political leaders on dérives sectaires in professional training, the almost 800 controls of the DGEFP led to the identification of only one body assimilable to a cult and four or five whose activity constituted the illegal practice of medicine, which were reported to the services of the Public Prosecutor (…).”

Professional Training Bodies and Cults: the Usual Fanciful Figures of the MIVILUDES

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