The Wolves We Were Told Would Protect Us: Childhood, Violence, and the Illusion of Justice
On May 29, 2026, eleven-year-old Lyhanna disappeared in Fleurance after leaving her middle school. Large-scale search operations were immediately launched by the authorities. According to the Public Prosecutor of Auch, a witness reported seeing the young girl after school in the vehicle of a forty-one-year-old man, who was swiftly identified by investigators through the examination of the town’s surveillance footage.
On June 1, 2026, Jérôme Barella was formally charged with the abduction and unlawful confinement of a minor under the age of fifteen and was remanded in custody pending trial.
On June 4, 2026, a body was discovered in Puycasquier, in a rural area of the Gers department, near an agricultural silo belonging to a cooperative for which the primary suspect had previously worked. The following day, the Auch prosecutor's office announced that genetic analyses had confirmed the body to be that of Lyhanna. The investigation remains ongoing in order to establish the precise circumstances surrounding her death.
Jérôme Barella, born in 1985 and residing in Montestruc-sur-Gers, was taken into police custody on May 30, 2026. He was subsequently indicted for the abduction and unlawful confinement of a minor under fifteen and placed in pre-trial detention before the proceedings were later reclassified as a murder investigation.
Prior to the Lyhanna case, he was already listed in the French criminal records database known as the Traitement d’Antécédents Judiciaires (TAJ). A total of nine legal proceedings had previously been initiated against him.
Among his recorded history and reported allegations:
In 2017, he was the subject of a report filed by the gendarmerie concerning a relationship with a seventeen-year-old minor. The matter was dismissed without further action, the relationship having been deemed legally consensual.
In 2021, he lost his position at the high school of Lectoure due to what was described as "inappropriate behaviour toward a female student."
In 2022, a complaint accusing him of raping a seven-year-old child was filed. The case was dismissed in May 2024 on the grounds that the alleged offence was deemed insufficiently substantiated.
In August 2025, he became the target of a complaint alleging rapes committed in 2024 and 2025 against a ten-year-old girl named Rosa. The allegations were reportedly supported by medical examinations conducted on the child, which "confirmed the presence of injuries." Jérôme Barella was never interviewed by investigators in connection with these allegations.
In June 2026, following the extensive media coverage of the Lyhanna case, additional reports concerning other alleged assaults were forwarded to the public prosecutors' offices of Côtes-d’Armor and Tarn-et-Garonne.
The disclosure of these earlier complaints, particularly those that did not result in the suspect being questioned, sparked intense criticism from child protection organisations and representatives across the political spectrum.
Weakened by the public outcry surrounding the case, the government acknowledged what it described as a "failure" and raised questions regarding the responsibility of judicial authorities. The Conferences of Prosecutors General and Public Prosecutors responded by stating that "any potential responsibilities, and even more so any future sanctions, cannot be identified" before the completion of official inspections. They further emphasised that magistrates are confronted with an overwhelming volume of cases and with governmental priorities that frequently shift according to current events.
Numerous alleged failures and procedural shortcomings are believed to have delayed the handling of the case. Criticism was also directed at the Cassiopée software system, designed to streamline judicial procedures, which has been accused of contributing to administrative delays.
Rosa’s mother subsequently filed a lawsuit against the French State and against Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin, alleging gross negligence. The investigators and magistrates responsible for handling the case were also targeted by complaints alleging endangerment of life and failure to assist a person in danger.
President Emmanuel Macron publicly referred to the existence of an institutional "malfunction" and acknowledged serious "failings" within the justice system.
Gérald Darmanin announced a joint administrative inquiry conducted by the General Inspectorate of Justice and the General Inspectorate of the National Gendarmerie in order to examine the management of these proceedings.
He further instructed Prosecutors General throughout the country to review 70,000 complaints relating to sexual violence against minors. France’s two largest magistrates' unions—the Union Syndicale des Magistrats (USM) and the Syndicat de la Magistrature (SM)—argued that such a review was either "impossible" or "unworkable," particularly because of severe staffing shortages.
In a statement issued on June 9, 2026, the High Council for the Judiciary (Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature, CSM) responded to the criticism by deploring what it described as the "discredit cast upon thousands of magistrates" and expressing regret over "the instrumentalisation of this case by those who are already holding magistrates accountable for this tragedy before any conclusions have been reached."
The Council further argued that the judiciary's budget no longer enables the institution to fulfil its expanding responsibilities or adequately respond to the emergencies entrusted to it. Beyond the individual tragedy at the heart of this case, the affair has become a stark illustration of the tensions affecting the French justice system: a system expected to protect the most vulnerable, yet increasingly strained by limited resources, mounting caseloads, and the growing gap between public expectations and institutional capacity.
But this is not merely a malfunction when it concerns the overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse and sexual violence cases. It is systemic.
How can one fail to see a profound cynicism in the fact that the very same Gérald Darmanin who publicly apologises to grieving parents is also a man who himself faced allegations of sexual assault—allegations that were dismissed without further action, just as countless sexual assault cases are dismissed every year in France?
How can Emmanuel Macron's words be taken seriously when he was among the first to defend Darmanin and keep him in office as Minister, just as he publicly defended Gérard Depardieu despite the multiple sexual assault complaints brought against him, including some involving minors?
How can one place faith in government officials who claim to treat this issue with the utmost seriousness while continuing to reject a thorough investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's connections on French soil, particularly regarding Jack Lang, who remains a free man?
As someone who was a victim of child sexual abuse between the ages of six and eight—a reality from which traumatic amnesia shielded me until the memories resurfaced in my twenties—and who was subsequently subjected to further sexual violence and domestic abuse on multiple occasions between the ages of eighteen and twenty, not to mention the countless everyday aggressions that women routinely endure in a patriarchal and misogynistic society, how am I expected to trust a government that consistently fails to protect children?
How am I expected to trust institutions that repeatedly grant second chances to child predators who, sheltered by a culture of impunity, often escalate from one offence to another, each crime more horrific than the last?
The case of Michel Fourniret stands as a chilling example. Before becoming one of France's most notorious serial killers and child murderers, he had already served prison sentences on multiple occasions for abduction, assault, rape, attempted abduction, and attempted rape. Yet the justice system ultimately released him back into society before he and his accomplice, Monique Olivier, carried out the monstrous pact that would condemn numerous young girls to death.
Within only a few weeks of his release, they abducted the first victim in what would become a long and devastating chain of crimes. No connection was made. No alarm was raised. The warning signs, though already written in plain sight, remained unread.
That is what makes these tragedies so difficult to accept. The horror does not lie solely in the crimes themselves, but also in the countless opportunities that existed to prevent them. Sometimes, the most frightening failures are not those born of ignorance, but those that emerge when society repeatedly sees the danger, records it, documents it, and yet allows it to continue its course unhindered.
I will always remember the last known victim: Estelle Mouzin.
Ever since I learned of Lyhanna's disappearance, I have found myself thinking every day about the moment the world ceased to feel like a place where I was safe.
Estelle disappeared in 2003. She was nine years old; I was six.
I remember her face perfectly. Her red sweater. The familiar blue backdrop of the individual school photographs that every child had taken. I can still see the missing-person posters displayed at motorway service stations where my family would stop on our way to summer holidays.
Estelle was a stranger, and yet she was me.
To the little girl I was, her disappearance felt like a detonation. It marked the end of innocence.
Unlike many others, I learned at the age of six that adults were not necessarily protectors. I learned that men liked to cast themselves in fairy tales as the hunter, yet in reality they were often the wolf.
With Estelle's disappearance, I understood that a shadow hung above our heads; that as little girls, we were prey.
I grew up carrying the awareness that I inhabited a body exposed to danger. I moved through childhood and adolescence with the feeling that my body was a prison. This physical envelope did not truly belong to me. It existed as an object upon which adult men believed themselves entitled to lay claim. Through their gazes alone, they taught me very early that they felt they possessed rights over me.
For my generation, Estelle became both a lost sister and a warning.
Her disappearance passed through me and left behind a permanent inscription: the fear of being abducted and murdered. Once that fear takes root, it never truly leaves.
This is how patriarchy embeds itself within both mind and flesh. It conditions us to expect violence as fate rather than exception.
Estelle travelled with me through the years, and I never forgot her. She remained with me like a promise: that despite all the cruelty of the man who killed her, he would never succeed in erasing her existence.
More than twenty years later, the story continues to repeat itself.
Children speak, yet they are not heard. They tell the truth, yet they are not believed.
Faced with this reality, purely punitive and security-based responses become a trap. One cannot dismantle a system using the tools that created it. Or, as Audre Lorde famously wrote, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
Child predators are not anomalies descending from nowhere. They are products of a patriarchal culture that normalises domination and of a society that repeatedly minimises, excuses, or ignores violence against children.
Of course, these men must be prevented from harming others. No reasonable person argues otherwise.
But prison is only a temporary wall. It neutralises an individual while leaving untouched the conditions that produce others like him.
What we should demand is not merely that such men be punished, but that they become the last of their kind.
What we seek is not more prisons.
We seek a world in which children's voices are treated as sacred.
A world that chooses education before punishment, prevention before reaction.
A world willing to dismantle the familial, institutional, social, and cultural structures that allow these men to act, to remain silent, to be protected, and to escape accountability.
The justice system, as it currently exists, has already shown us its limits: decades of silence, victims dismissed or disbelieved, institutions that too often protect perpetrators rather than children.
To demand more of this same system, without transforming its foundations, is to hope that the wolf will somehow become the hunter.
And history has taught us, time and time again, that wolves rarely surrender their nature merely because we ask them to.
Justice is neither failing nor merely complacent; in my view, it was built precisely so that people like Barella can escape true accountability.
I would like to believe that the justice system is simply bad at its job. The truth is far more unsettling: it performs its function remarkably well. The problem is that its function is not the one we would like it to serve.
Justice is organised in a way that leaves us trapped in a paralysing in-between state, a position familiar to anyone who has experienced coercion or domination. It is never quite dysfunctional enough for us to stop believing it is fundamentally honest and acting in our interests. Yet it is never effective enough for us to feel fully entitled to justice or to reject outrageous verdicts outright.
We are taught to shrug and say, "That's just the way it is."
From my perspective, this is because justice exists primarily to preserve the established order and protect existing structures of power while giving the population the impression that it is being protected. It functions as a façade designed to contain popular vengeance. It is a social regulator, a manager of public outrage.
Its role is to encourage people to place in the hands of the courts what previous generations entrusted to God.
In a society where the dominated vastly outnumber those who dominate, the greatest threat to the established order is the moment when ordinary people conclude that they have nothing left to lose—or more to gain by taking justice into their own hands.
Because the actor that exercises force most consistently and on the largest scale is power itself. And power rarely remains unchallenged unless it systematises both its own defence and the forms of oppression that sustain it.
Despite the numerous complaints filed against him, Jérôme Barella was never neutralised. I do not believe this was simply a coincidence.
His impunity, in my view, served a broader social function. It helped regulate tensions within a system built upon inequality and exploitation. To keep a population politically fragile, it must not be allowed to unite. It must be divided against itself. Hierarchies must be created among those who are themselves dominated in order to conceal the hierarchy that matters most of all: those who hold wealth and power, and the rest of us.
The first link in this chain of internal hierarchies is gender and age.
Working-class men often possess little economic power. Their frustration can become politically dangerous. In exchange, many benefit from symbolic and material advantages over women and children. This hierarchy weakens solidarity among the oppressed and contributes to the stability of the broader system.
Patriarchy, therefore, plays a stabilising role for power.
Indeed, misogyny and adultism are sometimes described as some of the earliest forms of social domination from which other systems of exclusion draw their logic.
It is therefore difficult for me to see as accidental that crimes and offences affecting women and children are often among the least effectively addressed by the justice system. Nor does it seem accidental that so little has been done to facilitate the collection of evidence or to help victims preserve and present it.
And if some men are victims too, they are not necessarily protected any better than women are. The system is not fundamentally designed to protect men. Their impunity is not granted out of affection for men themselves, but out of loyalty to a particular social order.
Likewise, it is hardly surprising that crimes threatening the wealth of the powerful, damaging property, challenging authority, or undermining status are often prosecuted more aggressively and punished more severely.
Justice was never designed to protect us—or so it often appears.
It was designed to convince us that we are protected.
And all the deeply humane magistrates who enter this profession with the sincere desire to defend victims often find themselves crushed by the very machinery they sought to improve.
This is why, unless a case becomes so public that injustice itself threatens to provoke widespread outrage, victims rarely obtain meaningful justice.
When millions of eyes are watching, power begins to tremble.
Because when ordinary people unite around a common cause, very little can withstand them.
The time has come for justice to be reformed by the people and for the people.
Because today, too often, it is victims who are trampled underfoot.
Until that day arrives, it falls to us to protect those around us—our loved ones, our neighbours, and the vulnerable members of our communities.
Complaints go unrecorded. Cases are dismissed. Predators remain free to harm again.
At present, we cannot rely solely upon the justice system.
We must warn those around us. We must inform neighbours, colleagues, relatives, and anyone who may come into contact with a dangerous individual.
Social accountability is, in many cases, left for us to enforce ourselves.
Whenever aggressors are granted the benefit of the doubt, that benefit is often purchased at the expense of victims.
A reputation is not worth more than a human life.
Lyhanna, little angel. Estelle. And all the others.
