Marseille City Hall condemns “particularly serious acts” and closes a leisure center where facilitators are accused of “mistreatment”

A mother, Fatima, discovered that her twins appeared in a video shared on social networks. Her son appears “in tears, hopping on one leg because the presenter had punished him”. Fatima announces that she is “filing a complaint for abuse”.

Marseille city hall condemns “particularly serious facts” and closes a leisure center in the 8th arrondissement, after the broadcast of videos of “abuse” children, broadcast on social networks without the parents’ permission, reports France Bleu Provence on Wednesday July 31. The municipality has set up a psychological unit and is asking the Departmental Directorate of Youth and Sports to conduct an investigation among all other Marseille sites managed by the same organization.

It all started with the testimony of a mother, Fatima. On Monday, she discovered by chance that her twins, a boy and a girl aged 5, appeared in a video circulating on the social networks Snapchat and TikTok. This mother is an influencer. She was alerted by one of her 145,000 subscribers. “I’m furious, I’m furious. I learn that one of the hosts posted my twins on her Snap story”reacts Fatima on her Instagram account. She shares extracts from these videos, hiding the children’s faces.

In one of them, we see her children at the leisure center. A woman, “the host asks them to say bad words”, Fatima says. We also hear a man say that “nobody will know.” Then, “At the end of the video, I see my son, crying, hopping on one leg because the host would have punished him. And when he was crying because he was in pain, she made him continue.”continues the mother, who is still furious. “This woman allows herself to humiliate children,” she lashes out, pointing out that her boy also had his hands on his head.

In the clip, a woman is heard telling the child that he is “punished”, “shut up” or even ask by shouting “You want to sleep, why are you getting up then?” before laughing. We see another child jumping and a woman laughingly declares: “Are you tired? Yes? Well, you jump.”. Fatima announces that she is going “file a complaint for mistreatment, for dissemination of images of minor children without [son] consent”.

Fatima was able to speak with the director of the leisure center, managed by the Léo Lagrange Méditerranée association, and located within the walls of the Raymond Teisseire school, in the 8th arrondissement of Marseille. The latter identified one of the facilitators who was behind the distribution of the videos. According to her testimony, she was fired. Two other facilitators, including the director’s younger brother, identified by the mothers who scrutinized several videos, were also dismissed, according to information from France Bleu Provence.

“As parents, we cannot keep them with us all the time. It is up to the managers of the various structures to ensure recruitment, to ensure training, to ensure that strict rules are put in place to avoid all these tragedies and abuses,” warns Fatima in another video posted on her Instagram account. “We saw what was filmed… but we especially did not see what was not filmed”worries this mother. Parents also fear seeing older and perhaps more serious events resurface because part of the team of activity leaders also worked during after-school activities at the same establishment, throughout the year.

The Raymond Teisseire leisure centre is therefore closed. The children who were registered there will be welcomed in two other centres in Marseille.