'Massive' child abuse scandal in France as school staff investigated for sexual assault

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. File picture: AP

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.

Emmanuel Grégoire, the new Socialist mayor of Paris, has launched a €20m 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 beengathering 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.”

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.”

Guardian