Every five days in France, a child is killed by one of their parents. This statistic is now finally starting to enter public debate, yet it is almost certainly an underestimate. In reality, there is “no precise or centralised record” kept of minors who die violently within their own families.
Indeed, a warning on this was issued a year ago by the commission responsible for advising the government on human rights. In its report, the Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme (CNCDH) spoke of “an unknown figure” when it came to the number of violent deaths of children at the hands of their parents.
It raises a troubling question: if these child deaths are poorly recorded, does that mean they do not count? Or at least, not all of them? Above all, how can a meaningful prevention policy be built on the basis of an incomplete picture? “The state needs to keep a rigorous count,” says Magali Lafourcade, secretary general of the CNCDH.
As part of an investigation Mediapart has compiled its own list of infanticide cases in 2024 based on local media reports, which can be found here in full (in French). These children died from stabbing or suffocation, from being shaken or starved. Sometimes, their faces made the front pages of newspapers; more often, their suffering was treated as isolated “news items” in the local press. Yet, when placed side by side, these stories reveal a pattern of systemic violence.
A common theme of the media coverage – when it exists at all - is just how little attention is paid to the dead child or children involved. On April 4th 2024, in a flat in Caen, in northern France, police discovered the decomposed body of a four-month-old baby, buried under fabric intended to mask the smell. Three weeks after the death, the mother finally decided to raise the alarm. Suspicion immediately fell on the father - he was the one who had allegedly struck the blows, apparently to stop the child's crying.
Now under formal investigation for murder and repeated violence against a minor under 15, he faces a life sentence if found guilty. The mother, reportedly a victim of domestic abuse, is expected to stand trial for failing to assist and for concealing a body. The victim’s name? The press does not mention it. Boy or girl? That is not recorded ... they were simply “an infant”.
Like him or her, most of the victims of infanticide committed in a family setting in 2024 remain nameless in media reports. At best, their age is given. Their lives are often reduced to their ending, their existence summed up by where it was cut short - a bin bag, a cot, a lake, a floor.
And if their body, reduced to a corpse, attracts interest, it is mostly for what it reveals about the perpetrator and their method - suffocation, decapitation, defenestration, starvation. But beyond this forensic view, little attention is given to the personal story of the victims themselves.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
At least the death of the “infant” in Caen was reported in the newspapers. In France, as we have seen, on average a child is killed every five days by one of their parents – which means there are more than 70 such cases a year. Yet, as in previous years, dozens of infanticides in 2024 have clearly slipped below the media’s radar (Mediapart's investigation found 46 covered in the press last year). How much longer will this continue?
“These cases are not given the coverage they deserve,” regrets a former prosecutor who has just retired and who did not want to be named. “I don’t understand why there is less media attention given to violent child deaths than to femicides,” says Barbara Tisseron, a paediatrician and forensic doctor in Orléans, south of Paris. “No death is more unacceptable than another.” What, in her view, is the stumbling block to them getting more coverage? “Apart from the sheer horror of it, I don’t know,” she responds.
Census of deaths drawn up by campaigners
Marie Albert has her own theory. A survivor of childhood violence herself, this journalist was the first, in 2020, to track infanticides reported in the media and publish a tally on her social media - initially to widespread indifference. “Infanticide is the tip of the iceberg of the particular violence inflicted on children in a society where adults dominate them in countless ways,” she says. “From everyday parental violence to murder, there's a continuum.”
But rather than viewing infanticide as a systemic issue, society prefers to see it as a string of isolated tragedies – of “family dramas”, “moments of madness” or even the result of the “monstrous nature” of some mothers.
As part of Mediapart's investigation we decided to publish a list of those suspected infanticides where the allegations - whether against fathers, mothers, stepfathers, or childminders (see black box below) - appear sufficiently substantiated. All those named benefit from a presumption of innocence.
Our investigation drew on the painstaking monitoring work carried out over the past year by Marie Albert, assisted by members of the campaign group Collectif Enfantiste. Or, more precisely, we drew on a portion of their work, since these campaigners not only track cases of intra-family infanticide but also infants left in cars and minors killed in street fights or drug-related violence.
The final list we have published is necessarily incomplete (it includes only media-reported cases) and imperfect (as judicial confirmation is sometimes lacking). Yet it still records no fewer than 46 cases, revealing both the diversity of the social settings involved and the universal nature of this brutality: a social housing estate in Ain, a département or county in south-east France; a suburb in Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris; a dirt track in Cayenne in French Guiana; a farmhouse in Normandy; a wooden house in the Giffre Valley in the French Alps; a housing development in the Pyrénées-Orientales département in southern France; the Pyramides district of Évry, south-east of central Paris.
'Repeated violence'
The charges brought by prosecutors rarely change. The same three or four offences appear week after week, as if justice were unravelling a grim and endless thread.
First, there are “murders”, where intent to kill is proven - or even “pre-meditated murderer” in cases where there has been evidence of prior preparation.
Then come the recurring offences of “deliberate violence resulting in death without intent to kill”, “neglect leading to death”, or even “involuntary manslaughter” - as when a mother is investigated after her daughter falls from the fourth floor of the flat where she had been left unsupervised. It is always considered an aggravating factor when the victim is under 15.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
And when the child has endured more than one “beating” or when siblings have also been affected, the offence of “repeated violence” may be added. A 2019 report on “the violent deaths of children within families” - which examined 363 cases over five years - found that “more than half of the children had suffered severe and repeated violence before their deaths”.
The report's authors added: “Often, professionals had already identified signs of violence. And in many cases, the abuse [...] could have been detected if multiple warning signs had been linked together to form an overall picture.”
In our list, charges of “failure to assist” or “failure to report” appear only rarely - such as in Brest, in west France, where the autopsy of a five-month-old boy found at home in cardiac arrest revealed older bone damage. The mother, who had noticed bruises and suspected the father, “failed to report the facts or to consult a doctor”, the prosecutor said.
Very young children
The ages of the victims rarely change, reinforcing the grim sense of repetition. The number of teenagers can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and only around ten victims were older than six. What is most striking is the sheer number of very young children.
A 2019 report by government inspectors found that “more than half of the children killed [within their families] were under the age of one”. There are two main reasons for this: the most vulnerable are the most targeted, and babies are unable to raise the alarm. This is reflected in the Latin root of the word infanticide - infans, meaning “one who cannot speak”. In this respect, the case of Emilio, who was beaten to death at the age of 14 in a village in the Pyrénées in southern France - allegedly by his stepfather, who was later arrested while on the run with the boy’s mother - stands out as particularly unusual.
The real sense of scale comes from the youth of the victims; in the Nord département in the north, a one-year-old girl was found dead on a sofa in a filthy flat, abandoned by both parents. In the overseas département of Guadeloupe, a mother is alleged to have decapitated her one-year-old son along with his four-year-old brother. Near Dieppe in northern France, another mother is said to have killed her three-year-old son by jumping off a cliff with him. In the Rhône in the south-east, a 22-month-old girl was allegedly suffocated by her nanny.
The list also includes victims of “shaken baby syndrome”. However, only four suspected cases were reported in the media last year - far below the estimated annual toll of around 40 deaths. Two nannies and a mother are facing charges of deliberate violence resulting in death, while one father has been charged with murder. The ages of the victims: four months, eleven months, two months, and four months.
As elsewhere, the gender of the victims does not appear to be a factor. Since it is not always specified in media reports, our list offers little certainty. However, the 2019 inspection report found that the proportion of boys and girls was “roughly identical”.
Both parents
And what about the gender of the perpetrators? Many are men, undoubtedly, but almost as many are women. The most shocking case of triple infanticide in 2024 was allegedly committed by a primary school teacher, a flautist and a member of her village’s municipal orchestra in Haute-Savoie in the Alps. She is suspected of having stabbed her three children – Jules, aged two, 11-year-old Noé and Victoria, aged 13 - before taking her own life. The only known case of a repeat infanticide this year also appears to have been committed by a woman.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
Even so, when nannies are excluded, the suspected perpetrators of intra-familial violence are men in a slight majority of resolved cases, whether fathers or stepfathers. This small over-representation becomes more pronounced if the highly specific cases of neonaticide - when a baby is killed within its first day of life - are set aside. There appear to be three such cases in our list.
These crimes are generally committed by mothers “trapped” by pregnancies they were unable - or did not know how - to terminate, according to sociologist Julie Ancian, who argues that such cases should not be classified within “child abuse statistics”.
In any case, in a recent report on “violent deaths of children within the family”, the human rights consultative body the Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l'Homme (CNCDH) wrote that, outside of neonaticide cases, “men remain the primary perpetrators”.
A link to domestic violence
And when men are responsible, certain patterns are strikingly clear: the couple were in the process of splitting, or the mothers were victims of domestic violence, and sometimes attacked at the same time as their children. In two cases from our list, the infanticides were also accompanied by femicide.
In the case of Célya, aged six, whose body was found in a wooded area with post-mortem injuries suggesting extreme violence, her stepfather was charged not only with murder but also with attempted murder of the mother, with whom he had just argued before she managed to escape. The mother of Nino, aged three, and six-year-old Lorenzo was not so lucky; she now lies buried in French Guiana alongside her sons.
It’s a crime of ownership: ‘You wanted to leave, so I'm killing them.’
The fatal impact of infanticide can also be more slow-acting. In La Réunion, the French overseas territory in the Indian Ocean, a father in the midst of a divorce killed his daughters, aged four and seven; their mother, unable to bear the grief, took her own life three weeks later.
Sekina’s story, in the Yvelines département west of Paris, also lays bare the kind of violence known as “vicarious”, meaning an attack on children as a way of punishing the mother. Having just filed a complaint against her partner and taken refuge at her sister’s house, she was absent when he seized the opportunity to slaughter Ginger, aged three, and Seydou, 20 months, that very evening.
“It’s a crime of ownership: ‘You wanted to leave, so I'm killing them,’” was her lawyer's summary during a tribute march for the victims in October. Shortly afterwards, the father attempted to take his own life but survived.
No trial
Other suspected perpetrators of infanticide have in fact taken their own lives: eight on our list, both men and women. On a Sunday evening in May in the Pas-de-Calais in northern France, the body of a five-year-old girl was discovered next to the corpse of her father, who had hanged himself instead of returning her at the end of his custody weekend.
In Toulouse in the south west, after stabbing 16-year-old Louane in the head and chest, her stepfather shot himself in the mouth. The context? A couple who were in the process of separating, according to deputy prosecutor Frédéric Cousin. “As the perpetrator of the crime is deceased,” the prosecutor confirmed, “the case is closed legally”. For survivors, being denied a trial can add another layer of suffering.
Other infanticides committed in 2024 are also unlikely to result in convictions, as the courts lean towards accepting a plea of criminal insanity. In the Seine-et-Marne département east of Paris, for example, a father attacked his two daughters, aged 22 months and five years, with a kitchen knife - inflicting 10 stab wounds on the eldest, 16 on the youngest. Their mother was also killed, suffering 54 wounds in total. But, as local prosecutor Jean-Michel Bourlès explained, the “initial psychiatric expert declared him to have no criminal responsibility”. The man has been diagnosed as schizophrenic and placed in involuntary psychiatric care.
Among these dozens of victims, only a handful have been honoured with a march in tribute to the victims. After the death of five-year-old Rayan - who had supposedly “fallen into the bath” - neighbours marched in Noisy-le-Grand in Paris's eastern suburbs.
With the mother and stepfather under investigation for murder and repeated violence, one woman taking part in the tribute took the microphone, her voice filled with anger as the march passed beneath the high-rise blocks. “Don’t stay silent! If you hear something from your neighbour’s place, it’s important to report it,” she urged. “We're all responsible - the justice system, social workers, schools, and us. Don’t bury your heads in the sand. This concerns all of us.”
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- This article is an abridged combination of three reports in French that formed part of a special Mediapart investigation; see here, here and here.
English version by Michael Streeter