When the body of an 11-year-old girl was found in a disused grain silo on a farm in the Gers region of south-west France last month, the news sent shockwaves across the country. Lyhanna had been missing for nearly a week. Members of the public had been out combing the area. Suspicion quickly focused on Jérôme Barella, the 41-year-old father of one of Lyhanna’s classmates, in whose car Lyhanna had last been seen alive.
Barella was charged in connection with the case, but denies any wrongdoing or involvement in the killing. But shock turned to public outrage after a local prosecutor revealed that the suspect had been the subject of several accusations of sexual violence against young girls before Lyhanna’s disappearance, yet until then had never been questioned by police.
With the political fallout intensifying, the justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, has sought to focus attention on the failings of the judicial system, raising the possibility of magistrates being sacked, and ordering public prosecutors to review “every case involving children” – about 70,000 unsolved cases in total – by 14 July. My first reaction to that announcement was: why are 70,000 cases still awaiting review? Were they not considered urgent before this tragedy?
Of course, it is likely that serious mistakes were made throughout the handling of the Lyhanna case, as a preliminary inspection report has already indicated.
But the problem runs far deeper. France has one of the lowest ratios of public prosecutors in Europe: roughly 3.2 prosecutors per 100,000 inhabitants, nearly four times fewer than the average across the rest of Europe.
The track record of the French justice system in handling sexual violence is equally alarming. According to the Institute for Public Policy, roughly 92% to 94% of reported rape cases never led to prosecution. This reflects not only the evidentiary difficulties inherent in such cases, but also an overburdened justice system operating with too few investigators, too few prosecutors and too few resources to properly handle the volume of complaints it receives.
For the small minority of cases that do move forward, justice often operates at a painfully slow pace. Years may elapse between the filing of a complaint and a final ruling, with criminal proceedings frequently taking years to conclude. Last year, the European court of human rights condemned France for failing to effectively protect victims of sexual violence, exposing serious shortcomings in both its legal framework and its handling of rape cases.
While drug trafficking investigations routinely rely on sophisticated investigative techniques such as wiretaps, surveillance, geolocation tracking and undercover operations, reports by the High Council for Equality and other public bodies continue to document serious shortcomings in the investigation of sexual violence cases, including delays in gathering evidence, failures to secure digital material and insufficient follow-up.
In 2023, France’s Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Against Children (Civise) delivered a scathing assessment. Its conclusion was clear: sexual violence against children is not rare but a systemic phenomenon, perpetuated in part by institutional denial. Across 755 pages and 82 recommendations, the commission highlighted recurring failures in the protection of children, inter-agency coordination, the timeliness of investigations and the judicial handling of abuse cases. And yet, as of 15 June, the commission found that only three of the 17 measures it had designated as priorities in February 2025 had been fully implemented.
In 2024, the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (Cese) warned of a “systemic crisis in child protection”, calling it a “textbook case of the failure to effectively implement social policy”. It urged the government to adopt an emergency action plan. Yet many of its key recommendations remain unimplemented, and the structural shortcomings it identified persist.
During the campaign that secured his re-election, Emmanuel Macron pledged to prioritise child protection. The record suggests that has not happened.
According to Civise, a child is sexually abused every three minutes in France. The scale of the crisis is staggering, yet it has never been treated as the national emergency that it is. This is all the more striking given the succession of high-profile cases involving extreme violence against children that have dominated headlines in recent years.
Last year, France witnessed the trial of one of the largest child sexual abuse cases in its modern history. Joël Le Scouarnec, a former surgeon, admitted to sexually abusing children for decades, with about 300 victims, many of whom had been in hospital. Yet the political, media and international reaction remained strikingly muted given the scale of the crimes.
In recent years, a growing number of public figures have also spoken out about the sexual abuse they claim to have suffered as children. They include the actor Adèle Haenel. This testimony has helped to expose the extent of male sexual violence against children in France and the failures that have long enabled its concealment.
As shocking as this case is, it is not fundamentally different in nature from the widespread and systemic violence inflicted every day on countless children in families, schools, religious institutions, sports organisations and care settings that are supposedly meant to protect them.
French politicians are only now beginning to grasp what feminists, child protection advocates and survivors have been saying for years: it is not a question of a handful of egregious blunders, but of a broader societal failure.
Had Lyhanna survived, her name might well have been added to the already far too long list of child victims whose suffering is met with a frightening degree of indifference.
In French, the very etymology of the word for child is revealing: the term enfant derives from the Latin infans, literally meaning “one who does not speak”. Yet children have always spoken about the violence inflicted upon them. What has too often been lacking is not their voice, but society’s willingness to listen. Childhood remains socially defined by a lack of power and agency, and it is time for that to change.
