France is confronting a significant child abuse scandal as school monitors across dozens of state nursery and primary schools face investigations for violence, sexual assault, and rape. Paris prosecutors have confirmed that police are examining more than 100 allegations of mistreatment, physical violence, and rape targeting children as young as three years old, occurring during lunch breaks, nap times, and after-school activities.
Scope of the Investigations
Paris's top prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, stated, “We have investigations under way in 84 preschools, about 20 primary schools, and about 10 daycare centres.” Lawyers involved in the cases have highlighted that the allegations include the rape of children aged three and four. Parents’ groups have long fought for these allegations to be taken seriously, pointing to failures in recruitment processes and background checks for school monitors as enabling the abuse to persist.
Parents and Lawyers Speak Out
Florian Lastelle, a lawyer representing three Paris families who have filed police complaints, described the situation as “a massive scandal.” He noted, “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, who supervise children during lunch, break times, naps, and after-school activities, often spend more time with children than teachers. They are not employed directly by schools or the education ministry but are recruited by city hall or local authorities, frequently without training or professional diplomas, and many are paid by the hour.
Nursery school is mandatory in France from age three, making school monitors a daily presence for children aged three to eleven. Accusations reported by parents across France include children being screamed at, pushed, having their hair pulled, denied food, forced to eat until vomiting, and being sexually assaulted or raped.
Specific Cases
Lawyer Louis Cailliez, representing two Paris families, filed police complaints in February over alleged rapes of nursery schoolchildren in 2025. In one case, a three-year-old girl was allegedly raped by a school monitor at a school in western Paris. In another, a three-year-old boy was allegedly raped by the same monitor, who had been transferred to a different school after complaints of physical violence. Cailliez described the child's distress: “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 added that the children are suffering physically and psychologically, calling the situation “daily torture for the parents who want the investigation to move forward.” Cailliez labelled the school monitor sector in France a “disaster” and “a national catastrophe.”
Upcoming Trials
The trial of a school monitor accused of sexually abusing five children aged three to five at a nursery school in Paris’s 11th arrondissement is set to begin next week. A verdict is expected next month in another case involving a 47-year-old school monitor accused of sexually abusing nine 10-year-old girls in Paris.
Official Response
Emmanuel Grégoire, the new Socialist mayor of Paris, has launched a €20 million (£17.3 million) plan to address what he called “major dysfunction” in the city’s school monitor system. He told Le Monde, “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.” 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 established a citizens’ assembly to discuss the role of school monitors, with a report expected in June.
Parent Advocacy
The parents’ collective SOS Périscolaire has been gathering testimony and campaigning for justice for five years. One of its founders, Anne, who requested anonymity, said the abuse scandal is 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 welcomed the investigations, stating, “At last parents and children’s accounts are being taken seriously.” Parents are also pushing for basic measures, such as receiving lists of names and photographs of school monitors working with their children’s classes, which are still not systematically provided.
A spokesperson for #MeTooEcole, a parents’ group in eastern 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.”
