With a feeling that mixes fear, anxiety and confusion, Maggie Abdel Hay follows the news of sexual violations against children inside schools in Egypt. Her heart sinks every time she imagines her son, who turned nine two months ago and studies at a private school, in the place of one of the victims. Every incident she reads about, and every story of a child whose childhood was violated inside a place that is supposed to be safe, adds to her panic.
Maggie’s fear and anxiety are part of a reality lived by millions of parents, as the moment of sending children to school turns from a normal experience into a source of constant tension and anxiety, amid a marked rise in reports of sexual violations targeting children inside Egyptian schools, whether public, private or international.
During the course of this investigation, 75 cases of sexual violation, ranging from harassment to indecent assault, against male and female students in Egypt’s schools were monitored and documented in the period from November 2023 to November 2025, indicating a recurring pattern that targets children between the ages of 4 and 16. All of these incidents took place inside the school facilities themselves: classrooms, activity rooms, toilets, or places out of sight of people and cameras. The incidents show that the accused were not limited to teachers, but also included administrators, workers and drivers.
These incidents were collected from news archives, official statements, and decisions of the Ministry of Education, the Public Prosecution, the Administrative Prosecution and the Ministry of Interior. The data showed that some schools witnessed more than ten successive incidents, most of which were discovered after the first case was announced, which indicates that what has been announced may be part of a wider series of incidents that have not yet been uncovered.
Cases were also recorded in which some school institutions dealt with these violations by covering them up and concealing them, which increases the risk to children inside an environment that is supposed to be safe. As for punitive measures, the investigation records only 7 incidents in which the courts issued rulings; the rulings during the period varied between first-instance and appeal rulings, and it was notable that in three rulings the sentence was reduced at the appeal stage.
The investigation also documents that all the perpetrators of the documented incidents were male, with no case recorded as committed by a female teacher or female worker inside schools. However, some female principals were implicated in some of the incidents, whether by covering up for the perpetrators or by ignoring complaints. Administrative penalties varied notably, between referral to disciplinary or criminal trials, or both at times, and cases of dismissal from work or transfer to administrative jobs were also recorded, up to the removal from their posts of some female and male principals who had been accused. Strikingly, however, in some cases the only measure taken was to transfer teachers accused of harassment from girls’ schools to boys’ schools, without any additional penalty.
Danger inside schools
“Maggie chose for her son a private language school in an upscale Cairo neighbourhood, whose fees exceed thirty thousand pounds in his third year of primary school, believing that a higher cost meant more safety. But the incidents reveal the opposite: the upper class is not immune to violations, and high fees are no guarantee of a safe school environment.
The documented data collected during the preparation of this investigation show that sexual violations inside schools are not isolated incidents. During the monitoring period from November 2023 to November 2025, 75 incidents of sexual assault on children were documented. Cairo came first with 17 cases, followed by Alexandria and Assiut with 14 cases each, then New Valley with 13 cases. Giza recorded 11 incidents, while Sharqia recorded two cases, and Beheira, Qalyubia, Dakahlia and Menoufia recorded one case each.
Chart(1) showing the geographical distribution of the crimes
It is worth noting that 5 incidents were discovered only during the interrogation of a defendant in a case of indecent assault on a female student inside a school toilet, as the defendant confessed during the investigation to committing similar acts before the sixth incident, over which he was arrested. It was also striking that some schools witnessed multiple, successive incidents, reaching more than 10 cases in a single school.
From the data collected and analysed by the author of this investigation, it emerged that public schools recorded the largest number of incidents, with 15 public schools witnessing 46 cases of violation. Private schools numbered 5 schools, recording 17 cases, while international schools accounted for only 4 schools, but they witnessed 12 cases. These figures indicate that the violations are widespread across the different types of schools, although public schools are the most affected. The figures also indicate that some schools witnessed more than one incident within the same period of time.
Chart(2) showing the spread of crimes of sexual assault on children in public and private schools
For his part, MP Abdel Moneim Imam, head of the Al-Adl Party, attributes the rise in incidents inside public schools to “an almost total absence of oversight” inside them and to the deterioration of administrative conditions, including the low wages of workers in the education sector, which has created a state of “frustration and unwillingness to do the work” and opened the door to negligence.
Speaking to Zawia3, Imam stresses that confronting sexual violence inside schools requires “a joint effort” by the family and educational, cultural and sports institutions, to ensure that children have the tools that enable them to speak out, report and reach protection.
According to the data gathered during this investigation, the nature of the incidents to which children are subjected varies. Of the 75 documented cases, 41 incidents of harassment and 34 incidents of indecent assault were recorded.
Chart(3) showing the nature of the incidents to which children are subjected
Notably, most of these incidents targeted the youngest students, which indicates that the abusers do not choose their victims at random; rather, the targeting is often systematic and premeditated. The number of incidents at the primary stage reached 59, followed by kindergarten with 9 incidents, then the preparatory stage with a total of 5 incidents, while the secondary stage saw only two cases.
Chart(4) Educational stages
Commenting on these statistics, Maha Abdel Nasser, MP for the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, tells Zawia3 that sexual violations against children inside schools have gone beyond the stage of individual incidents and have become a phenomenon that calls for in-depth study covering social and psychological dimensions. The MP points out that part of the problem lies in society’s justification of harassment and the blaming of victims, and the trivialisation of the crime that follows, as the result of “an instinct that cannot be controlled”.
Abdel Nasser stresses the importance of sex education in schools, considering it a basic necessity for making children aware of their rights and the boundaries of their bodies and for protecting them from any potential assault. She points out that awareness programmes should be part of the curriculum in all schools, ensuring that children understand their rights and the skills to defend themselves in a manner appropriate to their ages.
Meanwhile, Moheb Abboud, an educational expert and deputy head of the Independent Teachers Syndicate, believes that sexual violations and violence inside Egyptian schools are not merely individual incidents, but the product of a deep societal crisis reflected in children. He describes the situation as the bitter fruit of an evil seed planted in society, and points out that students are a “sensitive thermometer” that clearly shows the elements of deviance present in society.
He affirms, speaking to Zawia3, that these phenomena reflect the behaviours and contradictions of society as a whole, including models of corruption, pointing to the lawsuits filed against the Minister of Education questioning his educational qualifications, which have not yet been decided by the courts despite the lawsuits filed, and without any government action. He stresses that reform is not limited to schools alone but must include society as a whole, with a focus on instilling the values of rejecting violence and moral education from an early age.
Females and males
Maggie’s anxiety grows because her son is still at the primary stage, the stage that saw the largest share of violation cases during the period monitored by the report. What adds to her dread is that these violations were not limited to girls: although the largest proportion of incidents were against girls, at 64 incidents, boys were not spared either, with 11 incidents of assault against them recorded.
Chart(5) Incidents by sex of the victims
In other words, girls are subjected to such assaults at a rate about six times higher than boys, which highlights the particular vulnerability of girls to these violations.
Chart (6) Ratio of females to males
Dr Olfat Allam, a psychotherapy consultant, explains the abusers’ targeting of the youngest children, such as (the primary stage and kindergarten), by the fact that they are the most vulnerable and completely dependent on adults, as the abuser sees the child as “a weak creature” that is easy to control and lacks the ability to refuse or to reveal what is happening to them.
The psychotherapy consultant adds, speaking to Zawia3, that the age group between four and ten years is the most vulnerable, according to Allam, because a child at this age lacks awareness and the ability to discern, and can easily be lured or blackmailed. She points out that the targeting of girls in particular is linked to the cultural structure of society, which sexualises girls from an early age, even in childhood, as a girl is seen as a “female” even before she matures, which makes her a target for the abuser despite her young age.
Olfat believes that assaults on young girls are part of a wider picture of violence practised against women in society, and that the normalisation of this violence and the absence of real legal deterrence open the door to repeated violations against children. The psychotherapy consultant concludes by saying that abusers’ conviction that they are unlikely to be held to account, together with the general state of social chaos, contributes to the aggravation and spread of the phenomenon.
The reality in schools: what do the figures say?
Maggie’s anxiety and anger have grown in recent months as the rate of incidents has risen, especially after following news reports that showed the variety of abusers, among teachers, principals and workers inside schools, in addition to some cases committed by strangers who entered the schoolyard to follow their victims to the door of the toilets (the bathroom), which was recorded in 7 incidents during the period covered by the report.
Distributing the sexual assaults by the abuser’s job, teachers committed the most violations, with 49 cases, followed by school workers with 11 cases, then people from outside the school with 7 cases, committed by only two people. Two cases were also recorded as committed by school bus drivers, 3 cases by school principals, and three cases by school employees. This distribution highlights that the majority of violations come from within the school environment itself.
Chart (7) The abusers and their jobs
As for the places where the assaults occurred, most were in the schoolyard, in areas away from cameras or supervision inside the school, with 38 incidents, followed by classrooms with 16 cases, then the school toilets with 11 incidents. Two cases were recorded inside the school bus, and six cases in teachers’ rooms, storerooms and unmonitored side corridors, in addition to one case inside a room assigned to a worker and another in an isolated place inside the school. This distribution indicates that abusers often exploit isolated or unmonitored places to carry out their violations.
Chart(8) Locations of the incidents inside schools
In this context, Mona Ezzat, chair of the board of trustees of the Noon Foundation for Family Care, says that the growing disclosure of sexual violations inside schools was not a sudden development, but the result of long years of accumulated work led by feminist organisations that shed light on various forms of violence against women and children, including the marriage of minors and female genital mutilation. This effort, as she explains, paved the way for uncovering other patterns of violations, among them sexual violence against children, before the issue later moved into the circle of attention of state institutions and the media, which encouraged more families to disclose and report.
Regarding preventive measures inside schools, Mona stresses the need for immediate measures that cannot wait, including: periodic drug testing for workers; establishing early-detection mechanisms based on periodic questionnaires for students, complaint boxes, and specialised teams able to read signs of fear or anxiety in children; in addition to the effective return of psychologists and social workers inside schools, with real powers to follow up, support and report.
The chair of the board of trustees of Noon for the Family adds that NGOs bear an essential role in pressing to ensure that these measures are applied and in raising families’ awareness, by training parents to notice behavioural changes in their children and encouraging them to talk daily about what they go through at school, as a safe space for the early detection of any violation.
But Mona also stresses that part of the crisis relates to the behaviour of some school administrations that cover up for the accused and pressure children and their families so that complaints are not filed. She says that this pattern of cover-up must be met with decisive measures, not temporary closure, but the complete withdrawal of the school’s licence or placing it under a new administration affiliated with the Ministry of Education, ensuring strict oversight and real protection for children.
For her part, MP Maha Abdel Nasser stresses the importance of adopting public registers of abusers and imposing comprehensive background checks on all school workers, including the psychological aspect, before any employee is appointed, to prevent the crimes being repeated. Abdel Nasser points out that cameras must be installed in all schools and cover all facilities except the inside of the toilets, with continuous monitoring to ensure safety.
Maha explains that the absence of these measures, despite their simplicity, is partly due to the lack of full cooperation between the bodies concerned, including the Ministry of Education.
For our part, we tried to contact Shady Zalta, the official spokesperson of the Ministry of Education, to obtain a comment on the statistics monitored and documented during this investigation, and to ask about the procedural plan the ministry intends to adopt in the coming period to curb these violations, but he had not responded to our calls or messages by the date of publication of this investigation.
Cover-up and concealment
According to the monitoring and documentation carried out during this investigation, the position of administrations towards cases of sexual violations inside schools was distributed as follows: two cases were marked by ignoring or covering up the crime, while 7 other cases saw the complaint ignored, accompanied by threats or rebukes to the male or female student to dissuade them from talking about what they had been subjected to. As for the majority, numbering 66 cases, the administration’s position remained undetermined, owing to a lack of information.
Chart(9) Administrations’ position on the complaints
As for the ways in which these violations were reported, the routes varied: the victims’ families submitted 41 reports to police stations and security directorates, while 27 complaints were registered within the educational administrations. In addition, 5 cases were uncovered through the defendant’s own confession during the investigation, besides two cases submitted to the Administrative Prosecution. These figures show that the majority of reports went to the security bodies, which points to wavering trust between families and the accountability mechanisms inside schools and educational administrations, and to the educational environment’s lack of effective and transparent protection protocols that encourage victims and their families to report from within the institution itself.
In September 2023, the Ministry of Education and Technical Education issued an urgent letter to the educational directorates regarding the installation of surveillance camera systems in schools, with the aim of securing them against theft and vandalism, in addition to recording visitors’ details in visitor logs, with only one or two days set aside for meeting parents through the school protection committees to follow up on their children, to ensure that the educational process is not affected. Despite the importance of these measures in strengthening discipline, the letter made no mention at all of the policies or steps the ministry intends to take to confront the rise in cases of sexual assault against male and female students inside schools.
In contrast, the Minister of Education issued a succession of decisions placing some private and international schools under financial and administrative supervision after assault incidents inside them were uncovered, as happened at Seeds International School and at a school in Alexandria where four cases of indecent assault were discovered during November, as well as other schools that saw similar incidents, without announcing a clear and comprehensive strategy to protect children inside the school environment. Financial and administrative supervision means that the Ministry of Education takes over the management of the school directly and temporarily, to bring the situation inside the school under control.
For his part, the educational expert Moheb Abboud believes that schools need to re-democratise the educational process and give students and teachers more freedoms and more opportunities to express their daily problems, instead of focusing only on harsh punishments.
Abboud affirms, speaking to us, that a real response requires strict oversight and real accountability inside educational institutions, away from the culture of secrecy and justification that dominates some schools and protects abusers at the expense of children. He stresses the importance of clear accountability systems, strict measures against collusion, and separating educational institutions from political or personal influence to ensure the protection of students.
Regarding official responsibilities, Abboud believes that the Ministry of Education and the Egyptian parliament have not provided the necessary solutions, as the situation has remained as it is because of the selection of unqualified leaders, the failure to apply precise appointment criteria, and the lack of real follow-up on the application of educational regulations, which has led to the continuation of violations inside schools.
Abboud concludes that a school environment that ignores or justifies violations complicates the problem further, and that confronting this phenomenon requires comprehensive systemic reform covering curricula, administration and school culture, and the cooperation of society as a whole, to ensure that children are protected from all forms of violence and exploitation.
For his part, MP Abdel Moneim Imam explains that many school administrations choose to cover up incidents for fear of damaging the institution’s reputation and reducing demand for it, describing this as “a grave mistake” that contributes to aggravating the scale of the violations rather than limiting them. He adds that placing schools under administrative supervision is the maximum measure the Ministry of Education can currently take, considering that closing schools is not a practical option, given the direct impact this could have on the future of hundreds of male and female students.
But MP Maha Abdel Nasser believes that the current solutions adopted by the Ministry of Education, which rest on placing international and private schools in which a violation is discovered under administrative and financial supervision, without taking real steps to protect children, are insufficient and amount to painkillers for the situation, pointing to the need for a strategy and a plan to be rolled out to all schools to protect children.
Regarding the possibility of a parliamentary procedure such as an interpellation of the Minister of Education over the repeated violations, Abdel Nasser believes that interpellations are difficult, but says she is about to submit a briefing request at the start of the first session.
Reduced sentences
Most of the cases relating to sexual assaults inside schools are still under investigation by the prosecution or pending before the courts after referral decisions, while only seven rulings issued so far have been recorded, most of which reflected a divergent course between acquittal, reduction of sentences, or the imposition of harsh sentences at first instance.
In one prominent case, the Damanhour Criminal Court of Appeal reduced the sentence handed down against the defendant in the case of the indecent assault of the child Yassin inside a private school in the city of Damanhour, Beheira Governorate, from life imprisonment to ten years. In Warraq, the Criminal Court of Appeal of Giza amended the sentence of a defendant accused of indecently assaulting a schoolgirl, reducing it from 15 years’ aggravated imprisonment to 7 years after the appeal was accepted in form.
The Criminal Court of Appeal of Cairo also accepted the appeal filed by a teacher against the sentence issued against him and decided to reduce the penalty from 6 years’ aggravated imprisonment to 3 years, in a case in which he was accused of indecently assaulting a female student inside a classroom at a school in the El-Nozha area of Cairo.
In Assiut, the Assiut Criminal Court issued a ruling acquitting a teacher of the charge of harassing 13 schoolgirls at a primary language school in the city of Kharga, a case that stirred wide controversy when it came to light.
In contrast, the courts issued several harsh sentences: the Criminal Court of Giza sentenced a teacher convicted of indecently assaulting a group of schoolgirls inside the Ahmed Zewail School in Omraneya to 7 years’ aggravated imprisonment. In Cairo, the Criminal Court of Cairo sentenced a defendant to 15 years’ aggravated imprisonment for indecently assaulting a young girl under threat inside a school in El-Marg; he had confessed to committing five similar incidents before being arrested over the sixth.
The Alexandria Criminal Court also sentenced a teacher to life imprisonment after convicting him of the indecent assault of 10 female students inside a primary school within the jurisdiction of the Raml First police station. The three harsh sentences are all first-instance rulings, a stage at which the sentence may later be reduced when the case is heard on appeal, as has happened in similar judicial precedents.
Chart (10) The rulings issued
For her part, Mona Ezzat believes that assaulting a child aged three, four or five is “a horrific crime that warrants the maximum degree of punishment”, especially as its perpetrators are often adults exploiting positions of power. She points out that some recent incidents show collective assaults and collusion inside institutions, from hiding surveillance camera recordings to ignoring children’s absence. She considers this “a deviation that almost amounts to gang behaviour inside some institutions”, which, in her view, calls for the penalties to be toughened to the maximum extent possible.
It is worth noting that in February 2020, the Supreme Administrative Court in Egypt issued a final ruling barring a teacher from practising the teaching profession after he was convicted of sexually harassing 120 primary-school girls in Alexandria Governorate. The incident dates back to 2013, and the teacher was administratively dismissed in the same year from the school where he worked. Following that, the Administrative Court issued a dismissal ruling, but he challenged it before the Supreme Administrative Court, which upheld the final dismissal decision, without referral to a criminal trial.
For his part, MP Abdel Moneim Imam calls for a review of the penalties for crimes of sexual violence against children, considering that they need to be toughened further to ensure deterrence, especially as some cases have ended in reduced sentences at later levels of litigation, and pointing out that his party intends to submit legislative amendments at the start of the new parliamentary term to address these legal gaps.
Who bears responsibility?
Human rights lawyer Abdel Razek Mostafa believes that the escalation of the sexual violations suffered by male and female students inside educational institutions in Egypt has become a serious societal and human rights crisis that requires decisive action and a comprehensive review of the structure of responsibilities and the governing legal framework. These violations not only infringe the right to safe education, as enshrined in international charters, foremost among them the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but also constitute a direct assault on the physical and psychological safety of the most vulnerable group in society.
Mostafa affirms that responsibility in this matter is intertwined at several levels. First: the individual criminal responsibility that falls directly on the perpetrator, which is aggravated under the Egyptian Penal Code, especially in cases in which the abuser has educational or professional authority over the victim, according to the texts of Articles 268 and 269.
In addition, there is the responsibility of the educational institution, in which the school administration bears a clear professional and civil responsibility, including: “gross negligence in supervising students and workers; failure to report, or covering up, the incident, which places the school in the position of a partner in the crime; and weak procedures for selecting workers and the absence of careful psychological and behavioural screening before appointment, especially for sensitive jobs.”
There is also the responsibility of the Ministry of Education and Technical Education, which is responsible by virtue of its legislative, executive and supervisory competence, and whose responsibilities include: “imposing effective, unannounced oversight on schools; establishing and activating mandatory occupational safety standards and a code of conduct for all workers; and holding to account administrations involved in negligence or cover-up.”
Speaking to us, Mostafa stresses the need to adopt urgent measures to curb the violations and strengthen trust between families and educational institutions: activating oversight and reporting mechanisms by establishing an independent and confidential system for the immediate reporting of assaults that guarantees protection for the person reporting, and obliging schools to develop comprehensive camera systems covering all public spaces and classrooms, with continuous monitoring; in addition to conducting periodic psychological and behavioural screening of all workers, especially those in direct contact with students, and setting strict controls on the presence of maintenance and service workers in sensitive places without direct supervision.
Mostafa concludes that the current legislative system, although it contains provisions criminalising harassment and indecent assault, still has loopholes that need to be addressed. He proposes the issuance of complementary legislation entitled “School Safety” that sets out the protection standards that must be in place inside educational institutions and includes strict penalties against schools and administrations involved in negligence or cover-up, so as to deter perpetrators and protect students from the repetition of these crimes.
This investigation shows that sexual violations in Egyptian schools are not isolated incidents, but have become a recurring phenomenon that exposes the fragility of preventive measures and the weakness of oversight inside educational institutions, whether public, private or international. With continued delays in accountability and the reduction of sentences, children remain the most vulnerable group, exposed to constant danger inside an environment that is supposed to be safe.
