Two cases of extreme violence when leaving school, of brutal beatings with the result of a 15-year-old student dead and a 14-year-old girl seriously injured, have shocked France. President Emmanuel Macron, who yesterday visited an educational center in Paris, said that “the school must remain a sanctuary” and promised stronger measures to prevent this behavior and punish it more severely.
The fatal attack, of which a boy identified as Shamseddine was the victim, occurred on Thursday at a secondary school in Viry-Châtillon, in the department of Essone, about 25 kilometers south of Paris. The teenager was attacked in the middle of the street, near the school, by masked youths. This Friday afternoon, five suspects, aged between 15 and 20, were arrested and are being interrogated, according to the prosecutor’s office. The motive is unknown, whether it was a settling of accounts for personal reasons or between rival gangs, although testimonies who spoke to the media described Shamseddine as an apparently calm boy without problems.
In the case of the 14-year-old girl, Samara, attacked in Montpellier, more is known about the possible reasons for the beating. According to her mother, another student, a strict Muslim, had been harassing her for a long time with the reproach of acting like a “whore”, for dressing “in European style” and wearing makeup. It is not clear, however, if that was the main motive or there were other reasons such as jealousy or disputes of various kinds. Apparently some colleagues accused Samara of filming them with her cell phone without her consent. Several of the alleged attackers, all minors, were arrested.
These serious events occurred on the eve of the two-week spring school holidays. France is one of the countries in the world with the most school breaks.
Macron took advantage of a visit to a Parisian school to reflect on the increasingly frequent episodes of “uninhibited violence” among young people, at increasingly precocious ages. Without directly referring to the latest dramas, the head of state said that very often “problems begin in families”, with a special impact on single parents, who tend to be more vulnerable. As a basis for his argument he cited sociological studies carried out after the serious riots that occurred at the beginning of last summer following the death of a teenager in a traffic stop in Nanterre. on the western outskirts of Paris.
Macron insisted that the solution cannot lie only in the school system but in the responsibility of families, and that potentially dangerous situations must be detected in time. The president announced severe punitive measures, which may include sending the most violent teenagers to closed boarding schools.
France suffers from a serious cultural problem of frequent exacerbation of violence, as demonstrated by the periodic riots that cause vast urban destruction. French society tolerates and considers normal levels of violence that would be unacceptable in other countries, for example the ritual and random burning of hundreds of vehicles every July 14, a national holiday, and on New Year’s Eve.
