‘This is systemic’: Parents demand accountability over child abuse in French childcare system

Eve Irvine is pleased to welcome Anne, the co-founder of SOS Périscolaire in French. She argues that the controversy surrounding France’s after-school childcare system should be understood as a systemic failure of institutional accountability on the local level. The fragmented structure becomes particularly consequential when warnings about violence are known but fail to produce adequate institutional change. The result, she argues, is a system in which children may speak clearly, repeatedly, or even physically through behavioural changes, yet still struggle to be heard by institutions designed to protect them.