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.
You have to keep these perpetrators locked up for ever or execute them as all the sex offender counseling in the world won’t change the erotic attraction they have for children. It’s hard wired. Child abuse is their ‘thing’. Like serial killers…