ReportDirt, bad smells, absence of PQ and garbage cans… Belgian school toilets are as unwelcoming as in France. To make them real places of ease, in Florennes, high school students in visual arts have taken out the rollers.
Video games for boys, flowers for girls. The toilets of the Institut Saints-Pierre-et-Paul (ISPP) in Florennes, Belgium, could well appear in the background of an Instagram selfie. It also seems that they are the setting for videos on TikTok. However, these are high school toilets. Those who, in the memories of many of us, smell like macerated pee, continually run out of paper and whose locks malfunction. Here, students from the visual arts section took part in the “Let’s not beat around the pot” initiative in 2020, a project of the BYX fund (managed by the King Baudouin Foundation) in partnership with the Question Santé association, which finances toilet renovations. in Belgian school groups.
“In all my schooling, I have never been to the toilet at school”, said Ilan, a sixth-year (terminal) student, the only boy in this visual arts class. He flees the collective toilets of this place where he nevertheless spends eight hours a day. As for the majority of schoolchildren, whether Belgian or French, sanitary facilities are a problem. The latest survey in France on this subject, conducted by Harris Interactive for Harpic, in 2019among children aged 6 to 11, revealed that 55% only went to the school toilets when they could no longer restrain themselves, 7% declaring that they never went. “The Federation of Parents’ Councils has been campaigning for years for decent toilets. Because these places pose, in the current state of things, problems of hygiene and health which hinder interactions at school and are simply a lack of respect for the person of the child. explains the president of the association, Ghislaine Morvan-Dubois.
Paper next to the bowl, soap, hand towels, constantly accessible, sufficient staff to clean the toilets, are the main requests. Mme Morvan-Dubois underlines that the crisis linked to Covid-19 has had a positive influence on certain points, and that the specifications are tending to evolve in France. A “toilet plan” is underway in Paris. Gradually, renovation work is being carried out in the school toilets. Corn “a very great territorial inequality persists on the issue”, she notes.
“Girls’ issues”
In Belgium, the situation is similar. For Maëlle, a classmate of Ilan, the problem started in middle school: “There wasn’t even any paper, we had to bring our own tissues, it smelled bad, it became my obsession. » She remembers a used towel taped to the wall, insulting words tagged in, stabbings in doors. The students cite several schools and the same observation: indecent sanitary facilities. Arriving at the ISPP, behind the badge “WC girls”, the picture is not rosy either.
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