Girl’s murder forces reckoning with backlog of child sexual violence cases in France

PARIS (CN) — The murder of an 11-year-old girl has exposed a national crisis in France as an audit revealed a backlog of 85,047 complaints of sexual violence against minors that have yet to be addressed.For experts, the numbers are not a surprise.“Look, my main feeling is mostly a lot of anger, because it’s been almost 20 years that we’ve been warning the various governments, all the institutions about this,” Muriel Salmona, the president of the Association of Traumatic Memory and Victimology, said. “It’s a situation we are aware of, that we’ve been specifically calling out.”On June 4, Lyhanna was found dead in a grain silo in Gers, a department in the southwest of the country, after disappearing six days earlier. Jérôme Barella, a 41-year-old with three prior complaints for sexual violence against minors, was charged with rape and murder. aBarella had faced two prior accusations of raping minors, but both were dropped or stalled. A report released in June focused on a complaint filed in August 2025 by the mother of a 10-year-old girl who said Barella raped her daughter several times September 2024 and May 2025. He hadn’t been questioned in that case when Lyhanna disappeared.The tragedy prompted wider questions: If Barella was known to authorities, why wasn’t he under investigation, and potentially detained? The government denounces a justice system lacking critical resources and the ability to communicate effectively across different branches.While carrying out the audit in June, authorities discovered thousands of “phantom cases” never forwarded from police to prosecutors, meaning they weren’t officially recorded by the justice system.Denis Roth-Fichet, the secretary general of the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Committed on Children — known as CIIVISE — said the commission flagged the issue in a 2023 report.Wide view of a gendarmerie officer watching divers searching a reservoir linked to the disappearance of 11-year-old Lyhanna in Fleurance. near Urdens, France, on June 4, 2026. (Isabelle Souriment / Hans Lucas via AFP)Gérald Darmanin, France’s Minister of Justice, has called for a meeting with the Interior Ministry on Sept. 3 to address how different departments can ensure better communication and collaboration.But for Danielle Gobert, a lawyer and founder of the association “Les Maux — Les Mots Pour Le Dire,” which roughly translates to “Pain — The Words to Express It,” the problem goes beyond a lack of judicial resources.“There is a genuine need for specialization and training,” she said. “All professionals likely to hear the account of a child — or an adult victim recounting childhood abuse — must be trained: police officers and gendarmes, magistrates, lawyers, healthcare professionals, social workers, education staff and, more broadly, everyone involved in the child protection process.”The psychological damage that filing complaints can inflict on victims is made worse by poor training and long processing delays, according to Gobert.“When a person has taken years to find the strength to speak out and finally files a complaint, a lack of response or a stalled procedure can feel like a new form of abuse,” she said. “A decision to close a case without further action may be legally justified in some instances; however, it must never imply that the victim’s account lacks value — we must therefore improve the information provided to victims, enabling them to understand why a case is being closed and what avenues, if any, remain open.”Roth-Fichet agreed.“There’s a first consequence … a concept that is increasingly being brought to the forefront — secondary victimization,” he said. “This involves endless delays — sometimes 10 years for incest cases to go to trial — and the lack of a criminal justice response, which acts as a new wound.”This can be worsened by a lack of support. Carine Durrieu Diebolt, a lawyer and former member of CIIVISE, said survivors don’t always receive psychological care during proceedings because it isn’t financially covered.“The difficulty for victims is that they are, in a way, in limbo during the legal proceedings, meaning they hold themselves back from living while waiting for the trial,” she said. “And we have some victims who, during the proceedings, may attempt suicide, commit suicide, or become hospitalized. So … it’s very difficult for the victims, and obviously it needs to be faster, both for the need for justice and for the needs of the victims who are waiting for recognition.”The importance of psychological care extends beyond survivors, Salmona said, since the primary risk factor for committing violence is “having already experienced it because of trauma.”“So detecting violence as early as possible and treating, protecting and caring for victims means stopping this vicious cycle and this endless production of violence,” she said. “So we have the solutions; we’ve proposed plenty of them, we fought for the laws to improve, and the laws have improved, but they aren’t being sufficiently enforced.”Gobert outlined a number of changes she would like enforced: Prioritizing these types of complaints, developing specialized investigative units and magistrates, training professionals, improving information provided to survivors during proceedings and providing better support to plaintiffs when their cases are dismissed.Roth-Fichet said there’s no requirement for magistrates to justify dismissing a case.“If no one explains to you afterward why it was dismissed, and you feel like you were raped, for example, or were a victim of incest, and ultimately the crime committed against you isn’t recognized, you tell yourself, ‘Well, I guess I wasn’t raped after all,’” he said. “I already encountered this phenomenon when I was working in women’s rights protection — it’s quite similar among children and women.”Experts agree these cases must be seen as urgent.“In my view, sexual violence against children must be treated as a genuine judicial priority,” Gobert said. “This does not mean that every complaint must necessarily result in a conviction, but rather it’s about ensuring that every complaint is handled diligently, in a specialized manner, and with an appropriate approach.”Categories / InternationalSubscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads