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CRIME

New death threat against teacher in school in France’s Hauts-de-Seine region

Barely a day goes by without a fresh death threat against teaching staff being reported in France. This time, a teacher from a high school in the Hauts-de-Seine region has pressed charges after a student threatened to kill her.

Published: 30 March 2024 16:20 CET

This photograph taken in Chenove, in central-eastern France, on March 18, 2024, shows a police officer standing guard outside the Edouard Herriot secondary school before the visit of French Minister for Education and Youth, who is to meet the teaching staff following threats

This photo from March 18, 2024 shows a police officer outside the Edouard Herriot secondary school before the visit of the French Minister of Education, who was to meet teaching staff after the headteacher received threats. Another threat against a teacher has been made at a school in the Hauts-de-Seine region. (Photo by ARNAUD FINISTRE / AFP)

Following a disagreement in early March, the female student, who has now been expelled from the Michel-Ange school in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, called the teacher a “big bitch” and said “in the name of Allah, I’m going to kill her”, French daily Le Figaro reported.

On Wednesday, the teenager’s brother went to the school to seek an explanation for his sister’s exclusion. Feeling threatened, the teacher went to the police to press charges about the student’s earlier death threats.

The girl has not yet been arrested for questioning, Le Figaro said.

This followed the news that the headmaster at the Maurice Ravel school in eastern Paris quit this week after receiving death threats online following an altercation with a student last month. He had asked her to remove her Muslim veil on school premises and she refused.

His departure sparked outrage, with Prime Minister Gabriel Attal saying France would seek to protect teachers and secularism, a key pillar of French education.

On Friday, lawmakers and officials, including Paris deputy mayor Emmanuel Gregoire, joined several dozen people for a rally in front of the school in the capital’s 20th district, heeding the call from the Socialist Party.

“We will not back down,” Bruno Bobkiewicz, general secretary of SNPDEN-Unsa, France’s top union of school principals, said at a news conference later Friday.

‘Nothing but secularism’

Bobkiewicz said school heads will continue to defend secularism.

“They know what they have to do and will continue to do it in spite of everything,” he said.

“There’s no room for negotiation, it’s all about secularism, nothing but secularism, and there’s no question of backing down on this subject.”

Secularism and religion are hot-button issues in France, which has Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish communities.

The headmaster’s departure comes amid tensions in France following a series of threats and the murder of two teachers by radicalised former pupils, in 2020 and 2023.

In recent days, dozens of schools have also received threats of attack accompanied by gruesome videos.

Education Minister Nicole Belloubet said Friday a national “mobile school force” that could be dispatched to schools to protect their security would be established.

A member of the minister’s team told AFP the force would consist of around 20 people and could be deployed within 48 hours “in the event of an acute crisis.”

In 2004, authorities banned school children from wearing “signs or outfits by which students ostensibly show a religious affiliation” — such as
headscarves, turbans or Jewish skullcaps — on the basis of the country’s secular laws, which are meant to guarantee neutrality in state institutions.

‘We don’t stigmatise religions’

Martin Raffet, head of parents’ association FCPE Paris, said earlier in the day that some pupils did not understand the concept of secularism.

“The law needs to be discussed. Some pupils don’t understand it,” he said.

“We need to take the time to explain it to them and show them that we don’t stigmatise religions.”

In late February, the headmaster had asked three students to remove their Islamic headscarves on the school premises.

But one of them — an adult who was receiving vocational training — refused and an altercation ensued, according to prosecutors.

The principal later received death threats online.

He said that he had taken the decision to leave, citing his safety and that of the school.

Education officials said he had taken “early retirement”.

Frederic, a parent at the school who declined to give his last name, said that for the past month pupils there had been “a bit agitated”.

The headmaster’s resignation had left parents feeling guilty, he told AFP.

“We wondered if we’d shown enough support.”

The SGEN-CFDT teachers’ union said: “The repetition of this type of scenario, against a backdrop of the instrumentalisation of religious beliefs,
is unacceptable and could lead to tragedy.

“We know this only too well in the French education system, following the murder of Samuel Paty.”

Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was stabbed and then beheaded by a radicalised Islamist near his secondary school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in 2020.

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The report – released on the eve of the World Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia – documents a 13 percent jump in anti-LGBTQ offences from 2022.

More serious crimes including assaults, threats, and harassment saw a 19 percent increase, with 2,870 instances recorded by French authorities.

“It feels like the embers of LGBTI-phobia have been lit, and now the fire is ready to take hold,” said president of French activist group SOS Homophobie Julia Torlet.

“What worries us most are the emerging trends…we are extremely concerned,” Torlet added, saying “if the government doesn’t act” France risks backsliding into the violence seen in 2013 over the legalisation of same-sex marriage.

The number of anti-LGBTQ incidents has risen sharply – about 17 percent on average each year for crimes and misdemeanours – since 2016, according to the interior ministry.

But these figures only paint part of the picture.

Men account for the majority of both victims and perpetrators in anti-LGBTQ incidents, accounting for 70 and 82 percent, respectively.

Moreover, the perpetrators are predominately young, with nearly half of all accused under 30 and more than a third under 19, says the report.

While the report says victims are now “better received” by authorities, only 20 percent of those subjected to threats or violence and five percent of victims of verbal abuse file a complaint.

“We’re past the worry stage,” spokesman for Stop Homophobie Maxime Haes told AFP.

Anti-LGBTQ acts are linked to the “drastic increase in LGBT-phobic discourse,” said Haes, which he says are fuelled by “the rise of the far right and religious extremism”.

The owner of a bar in Nantes, a city in western France, told regional newspaper Ouest-France it cancelled an LGBTQ-friendly event in early May over safety concerns after a poster featuring individuals in religious habits sparked an “outpouring of hate” online.

And in France, 60 percent of people avoid holding hands with same-sex partners for fear of being assaulted, according to a 2024 report from the European Agency for Fundamental Rights.

The country has also seen a spike in transphobic discourse, Haes said.

SOS Homophobie has denounced what it calls “abysmal government silence” and criticised the lack of “ambitious policy” on LGBTQ issues even after the appointment of out gay Prime Minister Gabriel Attal earlier this year.

“Hate speech is not being combatted at all by politicians,” Haes of Stop Homophobie added.