Education: France acts to stamp out ritual humiliation of the new kids at school

At the elite design school in Paris it is called usinage. Each autumn, new students suffer months of ritual humiliation and torture: they are woken every few hours at night; they are forced to bolt their food; sexual insults are screamed into their ears by older students.

At the College Stanislas, a fashionable Catholic lycee in Paris, it is called the Soupe de Stan. The freshmen and women - les bizouts - are dressed in bin-liners and adult nappies and forced to drink soup made from pet food, chicken heads and pigs' legs.

They, it appears, are among the lucky ones. At elite lycees and colleges all over France, bizutage - the ritual initiation of the new pupils - has been growing increasingly vicious, often amounting to torture and sexual assault: slave auctions, strippings, sodomy with candles.

This autumn a pressure group of 17 parents', teachers' and young people's organisations - backed by the League of Human Rights - has decided enough is enough, and begun a campaign to have the practice eradicated. The government agrees. It has sent a circular to all colleges and lycees threatening to suspend or sack staff who fail to crack down on bizutages and listing the legal penaties - up to five years' imprisonment - which could be brought to bear on perpetrators. A draft law against bizutage is expected to go before the National Assembly next month.

In the meantime, the schools minister, Segolene Royale, has set up a help-line and urged victims to break the code of silence which has sheltered the ritual for years. There have already been some results. Following a complaint by a parent, two students at a lycee in Orleans have been ejected for organising the bizutage of new students wishing to join a judo class. Last year, male students had their genitals glued together; this year, there was an act of attempted sodomy with a fountain pen.

Fourteen students at one of the top lycees in Marseilles have been suspended following another complaint to the ministry. The pupils, including 11 girls, have admitted taking and distributing photographs of new girls in humiliating and partially undressed poses. Other complaints have been less chilling. One girl in Sarreguemines in Lorraine said she had been covered in flour and made to distribute pasta in the town centre.

The government campaign has been greeted with relief by many former students. A university professor, Jean Berard, writing in Liberation, said bizutage was "one of the most scandalous problems of our society". Not only were these "fantasies spewed from reptillian brains" tolerated in the country "which invented human rights", they were happening in the elite establishments.

A few people have stepped forward to justify bizutage: they speak of creating a sense of adulthood; of esprit de corps. The fact that it is most common at top establishments is not surprising: the elite form a kind of educationally selected, secret society and bizutage seems to be part of the entry requirement. But no one defends the more vicious practices of recent years.

Dozens of previous attempts have been made to abolish bizutage. But they failed to enlist the support of old pupils' associations, teachers or faculty members. They also failed to break down the codes of silence. At the Ecole nationale superieure des arts et metiers (ENSAM) in Paris (the country's premier design school) students who refuse to accept bizutage are declared "HU" - hors usinage - and excluded from the year-book of students which is their passport to jobs.

Mrs Royale went to the Lycee Pothier in Orleans last week after the student suspensions. She urged the students to revolt. "Have the courage to speak out without fear of reprisals or bullying," she said. "Don't be passive. Remember that denunciation is not betrayal. The law itself demands that you help people who are in danger."