‘Massive’
child abuse scandal in France as school staff investigated for violence and
sexual assault
Paris
police looking into more than 100 allegations of mistreatment by ‘monitors’
after parents’ groups said they had fought for years to be taken seriously
Angelique
Chrisafis in Paris
Mon 25
May 2026 07.00 CEST
France is
facing a child abuse scandal as ‘monitors’ at dozens of state nursery and
primary schools are investigated for violence, sexual assault and rape.
Paris
police are examining more than 100 allegations of mistreatment, physical
violence and rape of children as young as three by school monitors during lunch
breaks, nap times and after-school activities, prosecutors have confirmed.
“We have
investigations under way in 84 preschools, about 20 primary schools and about
10 daycare centres,” said Paris’s top prosecutor, Laure Beccuau. Lawyers said
the investigations included the alleged rape of children as young as three and
four years old.
Parents’
groups said they had fought for years for allegations to be taken seriously.
They said failures in the recruitment process and checking of school monitors
had allowed abuse to continue.
“It’s a
massive scandal,” said Florian Lastelle, a lawyer for three Paris families who
have filed police complaints over the alleged abuse of their children. “The
state school system is a source of pride in this country, but unfortunately in
France today it’s not possible to say that the public service guarantees
children’s safety.”
School
monitors are adults who are in charge of children during lunch, breaktime, naps
and after-school activities, sometimes spending more time with children than
teachers. They are not employed directly by schools or the education ministry,
but are instead recruited by city hall or local authorities – often without
training or professional diplomas and increasingly on a casual basis, with many
paid by the hour.
Nursery
school is mandatory in France from the age of three, and school monitors are a
key daily presence for children aged from three to 11.
Accusations
against school monitors reported by parents across France include children
being screamed at, pushed, having their hair pulled, being denied food, forced
to eat until they vomited and being sexually assaulted or raped.
Lawyer
Louis Cailliez, who represents two Paris families, filed police complaints in
February over the alleged rapes of their nursery schoolchildren in 2025. In one
case, a three-year-old girl was allegedly raped by a school monitor at a school
in the west of Paris. In another instance, a three-year-old boy was allegedly
raped by the same monitor who had been moved to a different school after
complaints he had been physically violent towards children.
Cailliez
said: “One morning, the three-year-old boy became so distressed in front of the
school gates, refusing to go in, that he fell into a kind of trance and his
mother was in tears. The headteacher had to come out to force the child into
school, and at the time neither the boy’s mother nor the headteacher knew why.”
He said
the children were suffering physically and psychologically from the
repercussions of the alleged abuse. He said: “It is daily torture for the
parents who want the investigation to move forward to establish the scale of
the offences.”
Cailliez
said the school monitor sector in France was a “disaster” and “a national
catastrophe”.
The trial
begins in Paris next week of a school monitor accused of the sexual abuse of
five children aged between three and five, at a nursery school in the 11th
arrondissement. A verdict is expected next month in another case of a
47-year-old school monitor accused of sexually abusing nine 10-year-old girls
in Paris.
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Emmanuel
Grégoire, the new Socialist mayor of Paris, has launched a €20m (£17.3m) plan
to tackle what he called “major dysfunction” in the city’s school monitor
system. “If there was a collective mistake, it was to treat these incidents as
isolated when in fact they point to a systemic risk, and perhaps even a
systemic code of silence,” Grégoire told Le Monde last month.
Between
January and April, Paris city hall suspended 78 school monitors, including 31
suspected of sexual abuse.
Grégoire,
who disclosed that he was sexually abused as a child by a school monitor, has
set up a citizens’ assembly to discuss the role of school monitors, which will
report back in June.
The
parents’ collective, SOS Périscolaire, has been at the forefront of gathering
testimony and campaigning for justice for the past five years, amid a struggle
to make parents’ voices heard. One of its founders, Anne, who did not want her
full name published, said the abuse scandal was nationwide. “This is clearly
systemic and across the whole of France. There is dysfunction not just at a
city level, but we’re beginning to say there is also dysfunction by the state.”
She said
it was a good sign that prosecutors had opened investigations into school
monitors: “At last parents and children’s accounts are being taken seriously.”
She said
parents were battling for basic steps to be taken, such as being given a list
of names and photographs of the school monitors who were working with
children’s classes. These were still not systematically provided.
A
spokesperson for a different parents’ group, #MeTooEcole, set up in the east of
Paris, said: “French society is opening its eyes to the fact that school is not
the sanctuary we had thought. When you drop a child at school in the morning,
that child is absolutely not protected against administrative dysfunction and
paedophile behaviour. Children are being confronted with all forms of violence:
from verbal and physical violence to sexual assault. It’s horrifying and it is
creating fear. Parents are outraged.”
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