Children in a sex education class in Germany were instructed to design a brothel “for everyone” as part of their course, sparking backlash from parents and even other students at the school.
The children, aged between 13 and 15, received the assignment at the Cardinal von Galen Gymnasium in Kevelaer, a small town in North-Rhine Westphalia close to the Dutch border with a population of just 28,000. The community is most known for being a religious pilgrimage site for Roman Catholics, who descend upon the town once per year to honor the Virgin Mary.
The exercise was part of a larger syllabus entitled “Sexual Education of Diversity: Practical Methods on Identities, Relationships, Bodies, and Prevention for Schools and Youth Work.”
This is not the first time prostitution has intersected with youth education in Germany.
France is confronting what prosecutors describe as the worst institutional child abuse scandal in its modern history, as criminal investigations spread through 114 Paris schools and nurseries where children as young as three were allegedly raped, beaten and denied food by the very workers paid to protect them. What began as a local outrage has now engulfed the entire capital, exposing systemic failures in the safeguarding of some of France’s youngest pupils.
The allegations documented by police, lawyers and parents’ groups are devastating in their specificity. Lawyer Louis Cailliez filed formal police complaints in February 2026 on behalf of two Paris families regarding the alleged rape of their nursery school children in 2025. In one case, a three-year-old girl was allegedly assaulted by a monitor at a school in western Paris. In a second case, a three-year-old boy was allegedly raped by the same supervisor, a man who had previously been transferred to a different school following earlier complaints about physical violence. Cailliez noted that on one morning, the boy became so terrified he refused to leave home.
That pattern of transfer rather than termination runs through the scandal like a thread. Le Parisien revealed that a monitor indicted in 2025 for sexually abusing three minors at a Paris school had already been taken into police custody in 2024 for similar acts at a neighbouring institution, and was returned to work regardless. Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire, who took office in March 2026, publicly apologised for the hiring of another after-school monitor last year who had previously been charged with sexual abuse at a school in a nearby district.
On 20 May 2026, Paris’s Brigade de Protection des Mineurs, the city’s specialist child protection unit, carried out coordinated raids across the capital. Officers detained 16 people working in after-school programmes at the Saint-Dominique state nursery school in the 7th arrondissement. The suspects, aged between 18 and 68, included kindergarten assistants, city education supervisors and activity leaders directly employed by Paris City Hall. Prosecutors confirmed the charges ranged from rape of minors and sexual assault to sexual exhibitionism and physical violence against children.
The attorney general is to review the sentencing of three teenage boys who raped two girls in separate attacks, after criticism their sentences were too lenient.
The boys, two aged 15 and one 14, were not given custodial sentences for the attacks in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, in 2024 and 2025.
They “brazenly filmed” the rapes on their phones and later shared some of the footage online. The teenagers were given youth rehabilitation orders (YRO) and walked out of court with 11 rape convictions between them.
A government spokesperson said the attorney general’s office had received “multiple” requests for the sentences to be reviewed under the Unduly Lenient Sentence (ULS) scheme.
Speaking on the Today programme on Saturday, Wendy Joseph, former Old Bailey criminal judge, said that had an adult committed a similar crime, the sentence would be “15 years plus”, given the age of the victims, the fact a knife was present and that the assaults were being filmed.
Earlier this year, I took the unusual step of publishing a minority report to the Women and Equalities Committee’s inquiry into discrimination, harassment, and abuse against Muslim women. Minority reports in Parliament are rare, but I felt it was necessary because the Committee’s main report failed to confront some uncomfortable realities about abuse from within the Muslim community itself.
As I was writing my report, I asked myself a simple question: would I accept these practices for my own daughter? Would I accept her being pressured to cover her head as a child, pushed into a marriage without full legal protection, expected to resolve family disputes before a religious body, or left without proper protection from practices such as FGM? If the answer is no, then it must be no for every girl in this country.
We know that Muslim women and girls can and do face abuse from outside their communities and this should be challenged wherever it appears. It is completely unacceptable. But protecting women from external hostility must not become an excuse for ignoring harmful practices happening within some communities and family structures.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what the Government’s response to the Committee’s report has done. The most telling aspect of the Government’s response is not what it says, but what it does not. Ministers found plenty of room for warm words on equality, diversity and inclusion. Yet when presented with my specific recommendations on headscarves in schools, unregistered religious marriages, first-cousin marriage, Sharia councils and FGM, they say nothing.
Britain is rightly proud of being a tolerant country committed to freedom of religion. Our tolerance though cannot mean turning a blind eye when women and girls are being disadvantaged and harmed.
A prolific transgender serial killer with prior convictions for the murders of two women has been convicted for the third time in the grisly slaying and dismemberment of a third female victim. Harvey Marcelin, 87, who previously claimed to identify as a “lesbian” called Marceline Harvey, was convicted in a New York court last week of the murder of 68-year-old Susan Leyden.
In March 2022, Leyden’s headless torso was found in a shopping cart blocks away from Marcelin’s Brooklyn apartment, prompting police to search Marcelin’s residence. There investigators discovered Leyden’s head, as well as a number of saws and bloody sheets. One of Leyden’s legs was found near a garbage can a few blocks away.
On March 11, the NYPD held a press conference with updates on the gruesome crime in which they released surveillance footage from a retail store featuring Marcelin. In it, Marcelin is seen utilizing a motorized wheelchair with what appears to be a severed human leg on the seat, visible when Marcelin stands from the chair to look at products.
During the conference, Kings County District Attorney Eric Gonzalez introduced Marcelin as a “female” and stated he was “born a male, but prefers the pronoun ‘miss.’” Gonzalez uses feminine pronouns to refer to Marcelin throughout, and often refers to him as a “female person of interest.”
In December 2022, just months after Marcelin’s arrest, former social worker at a Manhattan senior shelter filed a lawsuit against her ex-employer, claiming she lost her job after she warned her bosses that the convicted serial killer had made threats against her life while she worked at the facility.
Monica Archer was let go from her position at George Daly House, a short-term housing alternative for elderly residents in Alphabet City, even after convicted serial killer Marcelin was charged with the brutal slaying and dismemberment of Leyden.
According to an exclusive published in The New York Post, Marcelin “made constant threats to kill” Archer and other personnel, and was permitted to keep a gun on the premises.
Archer had suggested to her supervisors that Marcelin be transferred to a facility specializing in mental health disorders, but was ignored. She had also recommended Marcelin be placed in an “appropriate setting for the serial killer who has issues that I can’t address.”
Prior to the murder of Susan Leyden, Marcelin was well-known to police, having been convicted in the brutal deaths of two other women on two separate occasions.
In 1963, Marcelin was arrested for shooting his then-girlfriend Jacqueline Bonds three times inside their Manhattan apartment. He was sentenced to 20 years to life and was paroled in 1984. After his release, he went on to stab another female sexual partner to death, stuffing her corpse in a garbage bag and then dumping it on the street near Central Park.
Marcelin was arrested in 1986 for the second murder, but was once again released on parole in 2019. At the time, he told a parole officer that he had “a problem with women.”
Prior to the murders, Marcelin was accused of attempted rape when he was just 14 years-old; the allegation was made by a girl aged 8.
A 1963 psychiatric examination conducted by three unnamed doctors at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital concluded Marcelin had “schizoid personality with sociopathic features” but was not deemed criminally insane nor psychotic. In contrast, a previous hospital record from 1962 suggested he may have had “delusional grandiosity,” “suggestions of chronic schizophrenia” and “paranoid reaction personality.”
Curiously, Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital was where the term “transgender” was coined.
Despite having an erratic “gender identity” that has changed multiple times, Marcelin has been recorded by the New York City Department of Corrections as a “female” inmate.
GENEVA – UN experts* today raised the alarm over the large-scale sexual exploitation of women and girls facilitated and monetised by Pornhub and its parent company Aylo Holdings, as well as the role of payment networks, and search engines.
The experts stressed that businesses cannot evade responsibilities for being complicit in human rights violations and providing available tools to direct perpetrators. “A red line must be drawn,” the experts said. “Systems that facilitate and profit from the sexual exploitation of women and girls cannot merely be regulated at the margins, they must be fundamentally confronted.”
They urged the Governments of the United States and Canada to fully prosecute Aylo and require third-party age and consent verification for all user-generated pornography sites. While no response was received from the Government of the United States, in its response, the Government of Canada acknowledged the need to “modernize the private sector privacy law” and to enact legislation that would hold social media service providers accountable for harmful content.
“If we lose sight of this, we lose all hope in ending this epidemic.”
As I speak, 29 women and nine children are gone this year.
Last year, we lost 79 women to violence and the year before, there were 206 femicides.
In 2025, 27 children were killed.
This is the tip of the iceberg. For every woman I count, there are many others whose deaths fly under the radar.
The hidden homicides. Those women who deliberately disappeared. The women whose deaths are misidentified as self-inflicted, misadventure or accident.
And then there are the women we lose to suicide post abuse, stalking or sexual violence.
For every one woman killed by an intimate partner in Australia, another 10 female domestic violence victims will end their own lives as a direct impact of their trauma.
Rates of suicide among rape and sexual assault survivors are also high. These are homicides by proxy and yet no jurisdiction in Australia prosecutes abusers where their actions resulted in the victim ending her own life.
We are only just starting to understand the toll of post-abuse suicide. A national inquiry is in its final stages, and the federal government is working to overhaul superannuation laws to ensure abusers do not benefit financially from a woman’s death if there is a correlation between her suicide and the other person’s actions.
I have been documenting the violent deaths of women and children for almost 11 years.
My femicide and child death tolls are the most accurate and up-to-date in this country, if not the world — this is because I dare to go where others will not.
Multiple times each day, I search media and police news releases for dead women and children.
I speak to the police and other legal contacts across the country.
I liaise with frontline workers, including domestic violence specialists, emergency room physicians and nurses, morgue professionals and, most importantly, I talk with families.
I keep two databases — one with all the confirmed women and children lost to violence.
This database is extensive, maintaining information around cause of death, context of death, legal stages, perpetrator’s gender and relationship to the victim and the backgrounds of the victims.
The other database contains suspicious or misidentified deaths that I cannot quite get enough information to publish on.
You can find my work — and the femicide and child death database at my website AustralianFemicideWatch.
It’s important to stress that my work encapsulates ALL women and children killed regardless of the perpetrator’s gender or relationship to the victim. This means I cover domestic and family violence, associated violence — that is deaths perpetrated by someone outside the family circle — and stranger violence.
My research shows, 95 per cent of women killed died at the hands of a man they knew.
The roundtable, chaired by the Executive Director of DCJ’s Policy Reform and Legislation Branch, brought together organisations including Women’s Legal Service NSW, ACON, Inner City Legal Centre, Wirringa Baiya Aboriginal Women’s Legal Centre, the Office of the Women’s Safety Commissioner, SWOP, the Australian Association of Social Workers and Collective Shout, as part of a statutory review due to report to Parliament by December 2026.
The review is statutorily confined to specific provisions of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW) and the Criminal Procedure Act 1986 — principally the affirmative‑consent requirement, the fraudulent‑inducement provision, jury directions, and sexual‑experience evidence. Within those parameters, NSWWAA went with a clear position: the 2021 reforms were an improvement, but they are not yet enough.
The meeting canvassed a number of important issues, but the gap between the recognition of coercive control in the DPV Act and the consent framework in the Crimes Act was not otherwise put on the table. Under ‘further issues’, it therefore fell to us to put it there.
We then made three specific legislative proposals.
A statutory presumption that sexual activity during a period of established coercive control or domestic abuse is non‑consensual unless the accused can demonstrate it was freely given.
An explicit amendment to section 61HJ providing that there is no consent where a woman participates because she is subject to, or fears, coercive control — including fear of losing money, housing, or access to her children.
A mandatory provision under section 61HI requiring courts and juries to take evidence of domestic abuse and coercive control into account when assessing whether any apparent agreement was freely and voluntarily given.
A significant portion of the meeting was devoted to the fraudulent‑inducement provisions under section 61HJ — the question of when a person’s conditional agreement to sex is vitiated by deception. This is a live area of reform, and the discussion raised concerns about the potential for the provision to be misused or to produce unintended consequences.
What troubled us was not that those concerns were raised, but the direction the conversation sometimes took. Several hypothetical cases were floated where a person later felt deceived about who they had had sex with, or about key aspects of the other person’s embodiment or personal situation. Rather than asking the fundamental consent question — did this person truly agree to sexual activity with that particular partner on those terms? — the focus often shifted quickly to whether the complainant’s boundaries were themselves evidence of prejudice. In effect, objections were treated as bigotry, not as possible consent problems.
Stan Theodoros, 74, has been charged with the sexual offences against the women – aged in their late teens to 40s – which he allegedly committed in the early 2000s to 2015.
Detectives have charged the Highgate Hill man with 148 offences including 94 counts of rape and 54 counts of sexual assault.
He is expected to appear before Brisbane Magistrates Court on June 23.
Tasmania’s Anglican Church says its total estimated liability for historical child sexual abuse could climb to $80 million over the next 15 years.
The figure is more than double the church’s $36 million estimate from 2023.
What’s next?
Bishop Richard Condie says the church’s redress working group will meet to consider new options to find the additional funds needed, and that “everything is on the table”.
Dr Condie said he did not expect the new laws, which the government hopes to have in place by the end of the year, would affect the number of victim-survivors coming forward, but they could affect settlement amounts.
