People & Baby brand in the dock. While Victor Castanet’s book, Les ogres, denouncing the practices of private daycare centers has just been released, two former employees of the group appear before the Lille court on Monday. A former director and a former nurse are suspected of mistreatment and violence towards children looked after in a daycare center in Villeneuve d’Ascq, in the North, between September 2019 and May 2021.
The place is called Baby City. It was bought by People & Baby in 2018. Very quickly, a new management is installed. The first mother to sound the alarm was Ghita, in May 2021. Mother of two-year-old twins enrolled in the nursery, this doctor noticed, one evening, traces of lesions on the body of one of her children.
Summoned by the juvenile brigade
“These were typical injuries of abuse necessarily caused by an adult,” she mentions on RMC, in 2022She decides to file a complaint and create a collective to collect testimonies.
The filing of the complaint sets off a chain reaction. Three months later, in July 2021, another mother, Johanna, is summoned by the juvenile brigade, reports the daily newspaper Libération. During the investigation, daycare workers confessed to abusing her two children. A few months earlier, she had removed them from the facility, also suspecting physical and psychological abuse.
Eight families have filed a complaint
“With the arrival of a new director, I began to see the first signs of stress in my children in the winter of 2020-2021,” she told the newspaper. She too filed a complaint. In all, eight families filed complaints, joined in the ranks of the civil parties by the association Famille enfant partage solidarité (AFEPS).
In the dock, Manon D., 35, and Caroline G., 48, will have their work cut out to defend themselves against the accusations. Especially since the structure that employed them, Baby City, is also being prosecuted. And the race for profits that seemed to drive the parent company People & Baby may be at the heart of the debates.
