France's public prosecutor's office has opened an investigation after a survey on gender-based and sexual violence at CentraleSupélec, one of France's top engineering schools, revealed around 100 reported sexual assaults and rapes during the 2020-2021 academic year., reports RFI.
The anonymous audit was conducted among 2,386 students, by e-mail, in June and July this year. The survey "highlights particularly worrying situations of sexist and sexual violence", CentraleSupélec said in a statement on Thursday.
"The results of this survey stunned us," the school's director Romain Soubeyran explained. "We had no idea how bad it was," he added. "Faced with the seriousness of the facts", Soubeyran decided to alert the authorities.
The public prosecutor's office in Evry, south of Paris, opened a preliminary investigation on Thursday for sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape.
According to the audit's preliminary results, 51 women and 23 men said they'd been victims of sexual harassment in the past year, 46 women and 25 men of sexual assault and 20 women and 8 men of rape.