In recent years, concern has grown about the safety of children inside Egyptian schools, after several reports revealed cases of sexual assault and acts of violence inside educational institutions, which sparked wide controversy about the effectiveness of the child protection policies in place. Despite official assurances from the Ministry of Education that these incidents are individual and that the education system is fine, the facts and studies point to a structural flaw that needs urgent treatment to guarantee a safe environment for children.
Last December, Zawia3 conducted a data-driven investigation, during which it documented 75 cases of sexual assault inside Egyptian schools during the period from November 2023 to November 2025. Politicians and human rights advocates interpreted these figures as an indicator that the assaults had shifted from individual cases to a recurring phenomenon, while the Ministry of Education denied this, affirming through its official spokesman that these incidents are individual cases and that the education system is fine.
In a related context, the Egyptian Foundation for the Advancement of Childhood Conditions, in cooperation with the Egyptian Association for Economic and Social Rights, filed a lawsuit before the Administrative Judiciary Court, under Article 10 of the executive regulations of the Child Law, against the Minister of Education and Technical Education, against the backdrop of repeated cases of sexual assault in schools, demanding the activation of legal procedures to guarantee the protection of children.
In this interview, Hany Helal, the head of the foundation, explains the details of the lawsuit and the findings of the Zawia3 investigation, and presents his vision of what is required of the Ministry of Education and the role of the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, in addition to the rates of violence against children in society. He also responds to the demands to amend the Child Law to toughen penalties on children who commit crimes, explaining what he sees from the perspective of child protection and the application of appropriate educational and legal policies.
To the text of the interview…
The Egyptian Foundation, in cooperation with the Egyptian Association, filed a lawsuit to activate Article 10 of the executive regulations of the Child Law. What are the details of the lawsuit?
During the past period, we documented a number of cases and violations inside various educational institutions, and these incidents clearly indicate the absence of an integrated protection system inside these institutions. The reality is that the educational institution in Egypt is not in its best condition; rather, it can be described, according to studies and research, as repelling childhood more than attracting it, which calls for a comprehensive review of the entire education system.
That is, a radical reconsideration that includes all elements of the educational process, starting with the qualification of those in charge of it, passing through the curricula, and reaching the condition of the schools themselves in terms of buildings and equipment. What is happening now confirms that the problem is not an individual incident, but a structural flaw that needs comprehensive and sustainable treatment.
The violations we have witnessed recently clearly reveal the absence of protection policies and procedures that are actually applied. When the Egyptian Child Law was amended in 2008, there was a clear insistence on including provisions obliging institutions to apply protection policies and procedures, but these policies do not mean mere legal texts or written regulations, but an integrated system of procedures that must be implemented on the ground.
These policies must also be applied in all institutions that deal directly with children, and not only in schools affiliated with the Ministry of Education. What we are talking about here includes schools, nurseries and any institution that provides services to children, which the Egyptian Child Law explicitly affirmed.
The lawsuit we filed aims to oblige an executive body to apply a national law that already exists, namely the Egyptian Child Law, which explicitly stipulates the necessity of applying protection policies and procedures within all institutions that deal with children.
Protection policies begin before staff are appointed, and indeed before the institution itself is established. When building a school, standards of privacy and protection must be taken into account, and means of monitoring that guarantee the safety of children must be provided. When appointing staff, from the director down to the most junior employee, the criminal record of each of them must be checked, an assessment of their psychological condition must be carried out, and specialised training must be provided on how to deal with children according to approved protection standards. The goal is to create a safe educational environment for children that prevents violations before they happen and deals with them seriously if they occur, instead of being content with belated reactions after the harm has been done.
Zawia3 conducted data-driven investigations from the archive of news and official decisions, and we documented 75 incidents of assault; all of these incidents took place inside school facilities, and the lion’s share went to classrooms or places far from cameras and eyes… How do you see that?
I do not see that the matter has become a phenomenon, as describing it as a “phenomenon” presupposes the existence of clear figures and percentages indicating its size and spread. Even if we are talking about 75 cases over two years, this number, despite its seriousness, does not statistically indicate a phenomenon, but at the same time it is a serious indicator that must not be ignored.
The matter also indicates that the ways in which these assaults are uncovered have changed, as today we have more media outlets and platforms capable of shedding light on this type of case. These violations have existed for many years, but they were not visible or raised in this way. Shedding light is what pushes society and officials to stop and confront them, because the violation of a single child alone is a major crime that requires immediate intervention.
In approximately 2004 we had a clear example, the case of the “Nourhan” nursery in Maadi, where it was proven that there had been sexual exploitation of children inside the nursery for a whole year before the first case was discovered. This case was a turning point, and it pushed us to work on amending the Child Law, which was indeed done in 2008 to include this type of violation.
Is the problem in the laws or in their application?
The basic problem is not in the laws. Egypt has sufficient legislation to protect children, but the real problem lies in the absence of commitment to implementing these laws. Often, when you talk to an employee in an executive body, he tells you: “I have not received instructions from the minister,” or “The department director has not informed us.” Whereas the principle is that the issuance of the law itself is sufficient to begin implementation.
What we lack is awareness among those in charge of enforcing the law, from the highest level of the state down to the most junior employee. There is a clear deficiency in understanding the rights of the child and the concepts of child protection. Children are still often treated within the family, society and institutions as “property”, and not as human beings with rights at an age stage that requires protection and care.
In many cases, the family itself does not know the meaning of proper upbringing, does not understand the rights of the child, and does not possess the tools that enable it to discover whether or not the child has been subjected to a violation. Society as a whole lacks a culture of children’s rights, which is an essential, indispensable culture, yet it is absent.
And what about the state’s international obligations in this context?
Egypt was one of the first countries to sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and was among the first nine countries in the world. Indeed, the city of Alexandria hosted the first international conference to adopt the convention in 1990. The convention explicitly stipulates the necessity of spreading the culture of children’s rights widely within society, but this obligation has not been implemented as required.
The family itself does not understand the meaning of proper upbringing, is not aware of what the rights of the child are, does not know how to protect its children, nor how to distinguish behaviours that may indicate whether or not the child has been subjected to a violation. All of this must be included within an integrated system that we call “the culture of children’s rights”.
What do you mean by the system of the culture of children’s rights?
This culture must exist in clubs, in nurseries and in schools. The role of nurseries, as stipulated by the law, is not limited to caring for the child only, but also includes raising the family’s awareness and conveying information to it. This role is not exercised as it should be, so the family remains without awareness, the employee in charge of enforcing the law remains without awareness, the senior official in the state remains without awareness, and even the parliamentarian who legislates laws to protect our children may not have sufficient awareness of the rights of the child.
When we worked on the amendments to the Child Law between 2003 and 2008, there was a real political will that embraced the concept of children’s rights and the concepts of childhood. That was a golden stage in Egypt’s history. But now, what we are demanding now is to return the childhood file to the top of the priorities of the political will.
Because we are talking about nearly 50% of society, that is, about the entire future. If we are building a new state and a new republic, it is necessary to build the children first, so that they lead this republic soundly.
According to the Zawia3 investigation, most of those who assault children inside schools are teachers. What is your comment?
Statistics inside and outside Egypt confirm that about 80% of cases of child sexual exploitation are committed by those caring for the child: within the family, or by relatives, neighbours, servants, drivers or any person in a position of trust. By nature, a child does not trust a stranger, but trusts someone close, and this close person is the one able to commit the violation, keep it as a secret, and threaten the child with it.
Here lies the catastrophe: the person caring for the child is supposed to be the source of safety to which the child turns when in danger. If the danger itself comes from this source, a severe psychological disturbance occurs in the child: who protects me? And who assaults me? That is why we insisted in the laws on toughening penalties if the perpetrator is among those caring for the child, because the psychological impact is deeper and more dangerous.
When drafting the penalties, it stipulated doubling the penalty if the perpetrator is among those caring for the child. If the penalty is one year in the case of a stranger, it becomes two years if the assailant is from within the circle of care, whether a teacher or one of those responsible for the child.
What is your comment on the statement by the spokesman for the Ministry of Education that the assaults are not a phenomenon and our education system is fine?
With all due respect to any official, the education system is not fine; rather, it is going through a real catastrophe with regard to the protection of childhood. We offered the ministry to train all its teams on child protection policies and procedures, especially after the catastrophes we have witnessed.
We recently issued a guide for the social and psychological unit to train those caring for children on issues of sexual exploitation, and it is scheduled to be officially released within days. We are also working on preparing guidance booklets for families to help them discover whether a child is going through a crisis related to sexual exploitation.
The education system does not apply protection policies and procedures as required. The proportion of schools that have surveillance cameras in the various places is very low. The focus is always on private and international schools, while government schools are almost absent from these procedures. Even the ministerial decisions issued after some catastrophes were directed only at private and international schools, and not at all schools in Egypt.
Education must not be divided into international, Japanese, British and so on. All of these are our children within one education system, and the minister is responsible for providing a safe environment for all of them. There are good efforts being made, but with regard to childhood and its protection, there is still a clear absence of awareness of the meaning of protecting childhood, and of the importance of having clear and binding policies and procedures within the education system.
Therefore, we filed this lawsuit to oblige the relevant bodies to apply child protection policies, and to oblige officials and those dealing directly with children to learn them and be trained in them.
If we go back to history, we will find that violations against childhood have not happened only in the past two or three years, but over many years. We have incidents of teachers who harassed girls inside schools, and the punishment was transferring them to another school so that they could harass a new girl. And we have incidents of schools that cut children’s hair, and they were transferred to other schools to practise the same behaviour.
According to the Zawia3 investigation, administrative penalties outnumber criminal ones in assaults on male and female students in schools. What is your comment?
There is no such thing as administrative penalties in these cases. These are crimes and felonies committed against our children, and they must be referred to the judiciary. What is happening now is the logic of cover-up, the same logic of secrecy as in cases such as incest within the family, out of fear of “scandal”. This same logic exists inside schools, where the matter is closed internally so that it is not exposed at the administration, the directorate or the ministry, while no one cares about the child.
The child is not at the top of the priorities; rather, he is viewed as property, and not as a human being with rights that must be protected. When the child sees that whoever violated him was not punished, but was moved from one place to another, the message that reaches him is that he must be violated and keep silent, and that this is his role in society.
In this case, we will not succeed in rehabilitating the child psychologically and socially or integrating him into society, because his memory will continue to hold that the perpetrator was not punished. But if the perpetrator is punished, and the child is aware of that and feels justice, then and only then can we rehabilitate him and win him back for society. Continued impunity means that we are destroying the entire future.
For example, in one of the schools where assaults recently took place, the assailant had been dismissed from work for a year for the same reason before returning to work again. We are talking about a person who had previously been suspended for a whole year for committing the same assault, and the assault had taken place inside the school, and then he returned to the school again. This means that we are facing the reproduction of a crime inside the educational institution. The question here is: who is responsible for that? Those responsible are the people in charge of the educational process, and the culture of those in charge of the educational process itself.
We are talking about crimes committed against our sons and daughters, against children. The real question is: where are the measures the ministry has taken to restore the sense of human dignity to these children? Human dignity was squandered inside the educational institution, and no sufficient and serious measures were taken to deal with that.
In the end, there are formal measures, and after that the school owner or the owning company can, through the law, bring the school back into operation as if nothing had happened. We calm public opinion at the time, and then the matter ends.
What should have happened from your point of view, and what is your opinion on placing international and private schools under the ministry’s supervision following these violations?
There are procedures that must be followed. It would have been very natural, in such incidents, for the school’s licence to be withdrawn entirely, and not merely for it to be placed under administrative supervision for a temporary period until the investigation ends. The owner of a school inside which an assault on a child took place has proven that he is incapable of managing an educational institution, and is therefore not qualified to hold a licence for an educational institution in Egypt.
Our children are far, far more precious than investment in education. Our valuation of investment in education must not be higher than the value of the child. We want the child to be the most precious, not the investment.
How do you see the current role of the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood?
I cannot answer the question directly, but let me say that the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood played very great roles in certain periods. The issuance of the Child Law, and bringing civil society together in a single locomotive to protect childhood, was the product of long years of serious work.
The National Council has gone through many transitional stages during the past period. We struggled a great deal for the council’s independence from the Ministry of Health, and we did indeed succeed in removing it from the Ministry of Health’s authority, and a law was issued on its independence and its affiliation to the Presidency of the Republic.
This means that we have a council that possesses real power and authority. We have a council affiliated to the Presidency of the Republic, and this gives it real power and authority to impose the culture of children’s rights and impose child protection policies and procedures within all state institutions. The council’s role, according to its founding, is to coordinate with all the ministries concerned with childhood and to set the necessary policies. But, so far, I believe that the council has not yet reached this required level. The council needs to rebuild its relations with civil society, because civil society is able to help the council establish these policies and pressure the government to apply them.
There are children who commit acts of violence against other children, which has pushed some parliamentarians to demand amending the Child Law. What is your opinion?
The culture of childhood includes the rights of the child and positive parenting. For example, if a child commits a crime against another child, is the child fully responsible for his actions? Or is it the environment in which he was raised and the way he was brought up that led to that? If the family is aware of the concepts of parenting and the rights of the child, a well-adjusted child will grow up.
When we see a child who has committed a crime, we must hold his family and those responsible for his upbringing accountable. This is what we always demand in the cases in which we intervene. For example, at one point some children were accused of burning the Institut d’Égypte or committing acts of violence during the January Revolution, but we rejected all of this talk and proved that these children had been exploited by others. Those others are the ones who should be tried, not the children themselves. Another example: during my training on protection policies at one of the schools in Nasr City, we discovered that a child was constantly stealing water taps, and when the matter was traced, it turned out that his father was the one urging him to do so. Here, the child is not the main wrongdoer; rather, the one who must be protected is the child himself, from the environment raising him.
The high rate of violence against children is directly linked to the weak culture of child protection among those caring for them. Children are a vulnerable group unable to protect themselves, and those caring for them are required to protect them. Unfortunately, many families, employees, local councils, ministries and the government itself need education and awareness in this field, and the child file must return to the top of the state’s priorities.
Setting the age of 18 for childhood is not merely an international convention. Developmental scientists, psychologists and scientists concerned with human development have set out a curve for the mental, physical and psychological growth of the human being, which begins at 18 and runs until 21, as growth is proven to stabilise at the age of 21. Therefore, before this age, the child is not fully responsible for his actions.
A: Globally, in the case of crimes committed by children, the principle of going down two degrees in penalties compared with adults is applied. The maximum penalty for children in the world is 15 years, and in Egypt the maximum is also 15 years, even in the case of murder. There is no execution of children except in four countries in the world. Therefore, when we find parliamentarians proposing to toughen penalties on children or to lower the age of childhood, this is an indicator of a major crisis inside Parliament, and it requires real awareness of childhood laws and internationally recognised children’s rights.
What is the role that Parliament should have played in the previous Parliament, and that you hope it will play in the new Parliament?
There is a clear absence of Parliament’s oversight role over the application of legislation, even legislation that Parliament itself issued, such as Child Law 126 of 2008. Had there been real follow-up of the application of child protection policies and procedures within the ministries, and had there been serious accountability, we would have reduced violations and violence against children significantly.
And how can this situation be addressed?
The new Parliament needs comprehensive training on the concepts of human rights and children’s rights, drawing on international guides. For example, the experience of South Africa in the state budget and its distribution across rights, including children’s rights, could be studied.
Parliament must monitor the state’s general budget and determine allocations for child protection. Civil society is ready to play this role, and we must reactivate Parliament’s oversight role so that it becomes effective and expresses the interests of children and Egyptian society.
