When a young father watched a television documentary in January that focused on sexual abuse and misconduct in Parisian public schools, he was stunned to find that it concentrated on the preschool that his 3-year-old daughter attended.
Alarmed, he reminded his daughter that no adult had the right to touch her inappropriately.
She replied, in the halting language of a child, that a preschool employee had raped her with his finger in a school bathroom, the father said in an interview.
The father, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his daughter’s identity, filed a complaint with the police that The New York Times has reviewed. Louis Cailliez, the father’s lawyer, confirmed the central parts of the father’s account.
Over the coming days, the father learned that he was among dozens of parents from three schools in their neighborhood in central Paris — including their daughter’s preschool, St.-Dominique — to accuse school workers of child abuse.
The police opened an investigation and interviewed 44 children at those schools, Paris prosecutors said, leading to the arrest of 16 school workers in May. Two of them were detained on suspicion of sexual offenses, including the man accused of raping the 3-year-old.
The accusations at St.-Dominique are part of a widening sexual abuse crisis in the Parisian school system that has led authorities to acknowledge a failure to vet school employees and monitor their behavior.
By October, Paris prosecutors were investigating 179 sexual abuse allegations in Parisian schools, a parliament report said. Since January, at least 74 of Paris’s 14,400 after-school supervisors have been suspended after being accused of sexual violence, according to the city authorities. All of those 74 supervise out-of-class activities, and do not include teachers.
Most have yet to stand trial. Two have been convicted of child sexual abuse.
The lead prosecutor in Paris for child-related crime has warned against “contagious anxiety” that could lead to baseless reports, but she also stressed that her team was trained to assess children’s complaints and sift out false accusations.
Paris prosecutors are also investigating accusations of negligence by city officials including the mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire, and his predecessor, Anne Hidalgo.
Asked for comment, Ms. Hidalgo’s office referred to comments she made at a parliamentary hearing in September, where she and Mr. Grégoire expressed regret for what the victims went through and acknowledged the authorities’ “collective failure” to prevent sexual offenders from working in schools.
Mr. Grégoire also acknowledged flaws in how the city had dealt with abuse allegations, but said the city had never tried to cover up abuse. In response to questions about the accusations, his office said it was attempting a “deep overhaul” to prevent future abuse.
The furor compounds a broader reckoning in France over the pervasiveness of sexual violence and what officials have acknowledged as the state’s failure to address it. An independent committee appointed by President Emmanuel Macron to investigate child sexual abuse estimated in 2023 that 160,000 French children were abused every year, the committee said.
These developments have come amid the ordeal of Gisèle Pelicot, a woman drugged and raped by 51 men; a surgeon who sexually abused hundreds of children; and the justice minister’s acknowledgment that the government has done too little to investigate tens of thousands of sexual violence accusations. Protesters have held weekly rallies, separate from bigger demonstrations over school conditions, that call for officials to do more to prevent child abuse.
“We need a collective awakening, because it is clear that denial and silence persist,” said Agnès Evren, a conservative senator who led a parliamentary inquiry into the child abuse.
“How is it possible,” Ms. Evren added, “that, in a developed society like ours, we can accept such abuse of those who are the most fragile?”
The accusations have focused particular scrutiny on how France staffs its public education system.
Teachers in French preschools and elementary schools have no oversight role in lunchtime, recess, after-school hours and day care — which are supervised by workers hired by city halls.
City authorities struggle to find qualified people to fill those part-time roles. The out-of-class supervisors earn roughly $870 a month, less than half the minimum wage for full-time work. And because their working hours are so scattered, it’s hard for them to supplement their income with another part-time job, according to labor unions.
So the authorities either leave roles vacant or hire ill-trained temporary workers at the last minute, putting children in the care of people who may not have been properly vetted, according to a parliament report published in October. In Paris, three quarters of the 14,400 after-school workers are temporary employees with few or no relevant qualifications.
“There’s an incredible turnover, a lot of staff members come and go at schools,” said Lounès Semsoum, the head out-of-class supervisor at a school in Paris. “In a single day, a child might encounter as many as 10 different adults.”
A Crisis Years In the Making
Parisian officials had known of the problem for years.
A 2015 report commissioned by Paris’s then-mayor, Ms. Hidalgo, identified 18 cases of sexual abuse over a year in Parisian schools that mostly involved temporary workers. Although the report noted “a lack of predefined procedures for handling these situations” and recommended 50 improvements, the city took more than a decade to implement them.
In 2021 Élisabeth Guthmann, a filmmaker and mother of two girls, grew concerned about the behavior of their out-of-class supervisors. After the city seemed unwilling to act, she said in an interview, she and another mother began collecting and publishing accounts from other parents, hoping to demonstrate the scale of abuse in the school system.
At St.-Dominique, fears over the behavior of out-of-class supervisors surged last fall.
Parents there grew concerned when their children described harsh treatment at mealtimes, according to two parents who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their children’s identity. If the children raised their voices at lunch, the supervisors sometimes took their chairs away, made them eat in the dark, deprived them of dessert, or shook a rattle next to their ears, the parents said.
A lunchtime supervisor later left the school after parents asked city officials to suspend him.
But the authorities did not explain where he had gone or whether he was being disciplined, according to the two parents and email exchanges between officials and parents that were reviewed by The Times.
As parents in other schools made similar accusations, the city began to take stronger action. In November, it introduced new measures across Paris to improve the process by which supervisors are hired, trained and investigated.
The Documentary
The scale of the problem — and the authorities’ reaction to it — became clearer in January, when the documentary about schools including St.-Dominique was broadcast. The film, aired on public television, showed a worker kissing a child on the mouth. It also reported that a worker had been suspended following accusations that he had assaulted a child during nap time.
These developments spurred parents at St.-Dominique to talk in more detail with their children about their treatment at school. Four parents from different families said in interviews with The Times that it was then that their children spoke of being raped. The parents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the identity of their children, said that they had avoided asking leading questions.
One mother said her 4-year-old son started using his fingers to mimic the penetration of his buttocks.
What happened to her son was “much worse” than she had initially feared, said the mother.
City prosecutors began investigating, leading to the arrest of 16 current and former school employees, including the lunchtime supervisor who is under investigation on suspicion of “sexual offenses.”
Then it emerged that the lunchtime supervisor, after leaving St.-Dominique, had simply been transferred by the authorities to another school in Paris, where at least three parents also accused him of sexual abuse, according to Mr. Cailliez, the lawyer, who also represents parents ivolved in this case.
A second employee at St.-Dominique, who is under investigation on suspicion of sexual assault and indecent exposure, had been allowed to work there even though his son, now 18, had recently filed a police complaint against him, according to police records. The son accused the father of repeatedly trying to rape him as a child, according to the records.
A lawyer for the lunchtime supervisor, whose name has not been published by prosecutors, declined to comment. A lawyer for the second man said he rejected all accusations of wrongdoing.
Both have been placed in temporary detention but have yet to stand trial.
The post The Sexual Abuse Crisis in Paris’s Public Schools appeared first on New York Times.
