A former school employee was standing trial in Paris on Tuesday accused of sexually assaulting eight children, highlighting a yearlong crisis in the French capital’s school system involving child abuse accusations at roughly 130 schools, kindergartens and nurseries.
The former employee, a 36-year-old man named only as David G. in the French news media to comply with French reporting custom, was suspended last April and arrested in June, the Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement. Speaking in court on Tuesday, he denied all charges, adding: “Looking back now, I realize I should have been more careful around children, kept my distance, played with them less, and held them on my lap less often.”
Mr. G. was a member of the nonteaching staff at the Alphonse Baudin school, a kindergarten in central Paris, close to some of the city’s most fashionable neighborhoods. He was arrested after several parents expressed concerns to the school’s director about changes in their children’s behavior, leading the director to report the man to the authorities, the statement from the prosecutor’s office said. Mr. G. is also accused of sexually assaulting or harassing two adult colleagues. The school’s leadership has not publicly commented on the case and the education ministry declined to comment on an ongoing lawsuit.
Mr. G. is among dozens of nonteaching staff in the Parisian school system under investigation on accusations of sexual abusing children, often during after-school activities or during recess. The allegations have set off a crisis of confidence in the city’s school system and caused an early challenge for the new mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire.
“We hope this case will be a turning point in child protection,” said Rebecca Royer, who represents six of the victims’ families, along with another lawyer, Hannah Kopp. Their clients made the difficult decision to allow the public to attend the trial “so that society can understand that these aren’t isolated cases,” Ms. Royer said.
In the French school system, teachers recruited by the national Education Ministry oversee lessons and teaching, while staff members hired by the city authorities oversee recess, lunch hour and after-school activities.
Nonteaching staff members are mostly hired on a short-term basis, meaning they are often ill-trained and underpaid, Mr. Grégoire said at a public meeting with parents last week. Of the 13,000 such employees in Paris, 10,000 are temporary workers, according to labor union officials. That means school leaders often struggle to achieve a coordinated level of oversight for the children in their care, Mr. Grégoire noted at the meeting.
This dynamic attracted greater public scrutiny in January after the release of a documentary on the subject by a popular investigative TV program.
Using footage shot by an undercover reporter in the St.-Dominique kindergarten in central Paris, the program showed nonteaching staff members variously supervising more children than the regulations stipulate and yelling at children. Most disturbingly, one employee was shown kissing a child on the mouth.
After the documentary, dozens of families filed complaints alleging rape, sexual assault and violence.
In November, City Hall in Paris announced emergency measures to address the problem, such as asking more senior staff to conduct job interviews for nonteaching roles, increased training for nonteaching staff, automatically suspending supervisors flagged for inappropriate behavior and better communication with families.
Last month, Mr. Grégoire told the French news media that 78 school employees had been suspended since the beginning of the year, including 31 for sexual abuse allegations. He has defined the problem as his “top priority” and pledged 20 million euros, about $23 million, to tackle it.
In a later interview with Le Monde, Mr. Grégoire acknowledged a “collective responsibility” and a lack of communication between different parts of the education system, “with local management teams sometimes operating in isolation.”
“In many of these cases, my sense is that, if there was a collective failure, it was in treating these incidents as isolated cases when they actually reflect a systemic risk,” he added.
The St.-Dominique case — the biggest in Paris so far because of the number of children and educators involved — made headlines again last week when the city prosecutor’s office announced the arrest of 16 employees at the school and at two neighboring ones. Those arrests came after interviews were held with 44 children.
The prosecutor’s office said that two of the employees had been indicted on accusations of sexual offenses and placed in pretrial detention.
