Thousands of parents across France fear that paedophiles have infiltrated the country’s public nursery and after-school system, after a wave of suspensions, investigations and criminal trials involving classroom assistants accused of abusing children as young as three, in a scandal that one child protection expert has warned Britain is “not immune” from.
According to The Sun, the scale of the crisis has prompted Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire to confirm that 132 after-school assistants have been suspended in the capital since 1 January, including 52 over suspected sexual violence, with others suspended over allegations of physical violence towards children. In late May, police detained 16 people across three Paris schools during a raid, and at least 84 further cases involving assistants accused of mistreating minors remain under investigation in the city.
Concerns centre on the loose vetting process for after-school assistants in France, whose role is to supervise children outside formal classroom hours. Pay for the role is around the equivalent of £10 an hour, the basic minimum wage, with fewer than 20 per cent of staff given full-time permanent contracts — a combination that critics say allows almost anyone to enter schools largely unchallenged. When a reporter for French radio station RTL applied for an assistant role using a false CV last November, she was reportedly hired within ten minutes, with no checks carried out and no request to verify her claimed qualifications. A Paris-based child protection detective told The Sun: “The system is wide open for those belonging to paedophile networks to get jobs working with hundreds of vulnerable children,” adding that assistants are “often left alone with the kids while they are playing, napping, and even going to the toilet,” which the detective said is when abuse most often occurs.
Last summer, hundreds of indecent images of children were found on the computer of an activity leader at the Reuilly elementary school in south-east Paris, who was reportedly still working at the time despite already being the subject of a complaint of sexual assault against a minor. Other accused staff were reportedly transferred to different schools rather than removed from contact with children, where they allegedly continued to offend.
The first criminal trial connected to the scandal took place in March, when a former classroom assistant known as Nicolas G., 46, appeared before the Paris Correctional Court accused of sexually harassing nine ten-year-old girls and assaulting three of them. He denied all the allegations, and a verdict in the case, heard behind closed doors, is due on 16 June. The Sun reported that the behaviour had first been reported to officials back in 2021, with campaigners alleging nothing was done at the time.
A second trial, involving 36-year-old assistant David G., began last week at the same court. He was suspended from his post at the Alphonse-Baudin nursery school in April last year and taken into custody after a child raised concerns that were finally acted upon. He faces nine counts of sexual assault of a minor under 15, with alleged victims aged between three and five, and could face up to ten years in prison if convicted under France’s penal code. On the first day of his trial, David G. denied any wrongdoing, telling the court: “Looking back now, I realise I should have been more careful around children, kept my distance, played with them less, and held them on my lap less often. I used to play a lot with the children, carrying them, pulling them along. Once a little girl fell and I wanted to catch her so she wouldn’t get hurt. But there was never any sexual gesture.”
Rebecca Royer, a Paris barrister representing six families in the case, said the wider significance extended beyond individual schools. “There is another issue at stake, which is to show French society that this type of case is not an isolated incident and that it occurs systematically in a huge number of schools,” she said. “There is a scandal in Paris and the Paris region, but we know that this type of case also occurs in other cities.” Trials for three further accused assistants are due to take place this summer. Campaign group SOS Périscolaire says it has registered around 600 abuse allegations nationwide, with its founder Élisabeth Guthmann telling The Sun that complaints are still often dismissed, and that in one case, “nothing happened for years. Then a television camera arrived and Paris City Hall moved into action within four days.” Mayor Grégoire has pledged the equivalent of £17.5 million to overhaul the vetting process for assistants while acknowledging what he described as “systematic abuse.”
In Britain, anyone working with children is required to undergo a Disclosure and Barring Service check, a detailed process designed to uncover previous convictions or cautions. However, Jim Gamble, the former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, told The Sun that the UK should not assume it is immune from similar failings. “Appropriate vetting is very important. People who have a deviant sexual interest in children or people who tend to abuse or mistreat children will do that when they have the opportunity,” he said. “You don’t need to look too far back to see this kind of behaviour manifesting itself in UK schools. Over the last couple of years we have seen nursery schools where individuals have been caught and imprisoned for significant periods of time for offenses against toddlers that range from cruelty and sexual abuse to rape. The UK is further down the road to the likes of France with regards to our understanding to the nature of predatory behaviour — but we are not immune from this.”
If you have been affected by the issues raised in this article, support is available through the NSPCC helpline.
