Boys' rape of girl (13) highlights rising child crime rate

French police at the Brigade des Mineurs, which deals with juvenile offenders, had never seen anything like it.

Four boys aged 11 and 12 waited for a 13-year-old girl when she left school on September 21st, took her to the basement of a building in a housing project near Paris's peripherique ring road and gang-raped her.

The children charged with rape on Wednesday night look like young boys, not precocious adolescents, police said.

Two were wearing school rucksacks when they were arrested on Tuesday.

All four lived in the same poor area of the 14th arrondissement, and two attended school with the victim.

They were arrested on the school grounds the following day, after she filed a complaint against them.

Mr Yvon Tallec, the prosecutor for minors who is handling the case, told The Irish Times that the girl is in shock but is well cared for by her family.

The boys were held for 20 hours before being charged. All four admitted to having had sexual relations with the victim, but some claimed it was with her consent. Like the murder of Jamie Bolger in Britain, the case has shocked the public chiefly because of the young age of the attackers.

Children's judges say sexual aggression by boys of 14 or older is not uncommon, but rape by an 11-year-old was previously unheard of.

Under French law, children under the age of 13 cannot be jailed, and the four boys were sent home to their families, although the judge may place them in a home for delinquent children. They are forbidden from seeing the victim, and have been expelled from school but will continue their studies elsewhere, as the law requires.

All will be tried by a closed-door children's tribunal. They may be pronounced guilty, but will be subject only to re-education - not criminal punishment.

The rape in the rue Raymond-Losserand has drawn attention to the rising crime rate among French children.

Mr Tellec said crimes by minors are rising 10 per cent each year in the Paris region.

"What worries me is that the crimes are becoming more violent, and the perpetrators younger," he added.

Up to 20 per cent of people arrested are minors. Theft is the most common infraction.

"There are many causes," Mr Tellec said. "Children reach puberty earlier. They are more autonomous, and their families are often disintegrating. They have trouble adapting, and immigration and the violent environment they live in are factors."

Child psychiatrists said public stupefaction was a sign that French society underestimates the sexuality of children.

"We must stop dramatising this case because the boy was 11 years old," Ms Marie-Paule Poilpot, the director of the French Children's Foundation, said.

"Rape is horrible because it denies the personhood of the victim - whatever the age of the rapist. I am much more shocked by adults who molest their own children." Ms Poilpot said the rape victim and her aggressors may grow up to be normal adults.

"Nothing is irreversible with a child - they recover," she said.