Mélanie Grapinet had always been a familiar name around town – not because of what happened, but before that, too.
For years, she had worked at the local beauty salon, offering haircuts and friendly chats, before charting out a new path as a school monitor at the local junior high. She loved her preschool-age son and was known for being the life of the party.
But in Nogent, a town of around 4,000, most residents clam up at the mention of her name today. Just a few months since 14-year-old Quentin G. killed Ms. Grapinet outside the local junior high in June, few are comfortable talking about what happened. Residents are just trying to move forward.
Why We Wrote This
Violence at schools, committed by students or former students, has been a growing problem in Europe over recent years. For teachers and officials, the solution is to restrict youth’s access to social media – though that’s easier said than done.
“This is a small town, where everyone knows everyone,” says Sylvie, a local bakery worker who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her employers, who were good friends with Ms. Grapinet. “The lives of two families have been shattered.”
Nogent residents are not alone in their pain. On the same day in June, in an eerie parallel, a 21-year-old man in Austria walked into his former high school in the city of Graz and killed nine students and a teacher, in what became the worst school shooting in the country’s history.
Amid the current academic year, teachers and parents are reckoning with the rising number of violent incidents aimed at educators, students, and schools in Western Europe.
Though mass shootings remain rare in Europe, two of the worst school shootings – in Austria and Sweden – have occurred since 2023. Both France and Germany reported a spate of fatal stabbings at schools in the past year.
While the scale of school attacks here hardly compares to American figures – there were more than 330 school shootings in the United States in 2024 alone, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database – coming to terms with the tragedies is no less brutal. It is not only the loss of innocent lives, but also a feeling that school is no longer the safe haven it was once thought to be.
In an effort to protect young people from dangerous or violent online content, the European Union has given member states the go-ahead to implement national bans on social media for minors. Meanwhile, educators say teens’ mental health is eroding and that schools are strapped for resources to help students in need.
As Europe’s education community grieves, it also seeks answers: Why are European teens carrying out attacks at school, and what can be done to help them?
“We can’t just look at a child’s behavior at face value. We need to think about what it means,” says Cécile Vienot, a Paris-based child psychologist. “Why are their grades slipping drastically in the middle of the year? Is there something going on at home? Are they being bullied? Our current debate lacks complexity.”
“What traces did he leave?”
In the days following the incidents this summer, Quentin (who has not been fully identified in France due to his age) was described as a regular teen with no violent history. In Graz, the perpetrator was called a loner, obsessed with online first-person shooter games. Communities in France and Austria wondered, Had they missed the warning signs?
Mental health experts say there is no specific personality profile that lends itself to school violence. On the morning of the attack, Quentin had taken a 34-centimeter (13-inch) knife from his kitchen in order to “cause the most damage” to any adult school monitor, he told authorities when he confessed after the attack. But he did not appear to suffer from any specific mental disorder, according to a French prosecutor.
“Young attackers are often described as people without a past,” says Antoine Lailly, a psychologist who works in a youth center in Agen, France. “More likely, he didn’t make noise or cause problems. He got overlooked. We should be asking ourselves, What traces did he leave?”
A study of teenagers in 37 European countries by the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs showed that 2 in 5 teens struggle with their mental well-being, with boys reporting better mental health than girls. Yet a large majority of school attacks are committed by boys and young men.
“This definitely tells us something,” says Mr. Lailly. “Not that our boys are doing well, but that they’re not asking for help.”
Teens who commit violence generally have poor levels of mental health and at least one aggravating factor, such as being the target of bullying, harassment, or physical or sexual abuse. In Europe, incidents of cyberbullying have been on the rise since 2018, and 14% of boys and 6% of girls have been involved in physical violence at school, according to a study by the World Health Organization/Europe.
But not all such teens go on to commit violence toward others. Experts point to an extreme feeling of hopelessness and resignation – a sense that no one has listened to them or cares – as reasons for acting out, and a lack of adult support. Often, a precipitating event, like the death of a loved one or a breakup with friends, can cause a teen to snap.
Heinz-Peter Bader/AP/File
“Thoughts and fantasies of violence are very widespread. Initially, they can serve to regulate self-esteem or emotions,” says Karoline Roshdi, a forensic psychologist in Darmstadt, Germany.
“But for those who commit serious attacks, thoughts of violence are not enough to regulate themselves. They increasingly isolate themselves from others due to their own crisis and see violence as the solution.”
Social media and antisocial behavior
Experts point to the COVID-19 pandemic as the moment when teens broadly became more isolated from their peers, with schools shifting to online learning and children connecting with friends via social media instead of face-to-face.
“Young people were taught to stay in their corners instead of going to see people in need,” says Anne Coffinier-Barry, the founder of Créer son Ecole, a nonprofit that has called for a rethinking of France’s education system. “It created a confusing experience for them. … Many have never recovered from it.”
“Problematic social media use” – defined as “addictive-like” usage and the experiencing of negative consequences – increased from 7% to 11% between 2018 and 2022 among adolescents, according to a 2024 WHO report. And a 2024 Bitkom survey of 1,293 young people found that on average, teens spend up to three hours on their smartphones per day, with 70% of British teens saying they felt worse after spending time on social media.
Those negative emotions are partly due, say experts, to the content being viewed. A study of 10,000 teenagers in England and Wales by the Youth Endowment Fund found that 70% of teens had seen real-life violence – like stabbings and gang attacks – on social media in the last 12 months. One in 4 teens who see real-life violence online are served clips automatically by an algorithm, the study showed.
Experts say it is hard to make a direct link between social media use and violent behavior, but studies consistently assert that heavy or prolonged use of social media appears to increase mental health risks. Because teens who commit violence often have poor mental health and well-being, observers say more research should be dedicated to studying the relationship between social media and acts of violence.
“There are always multiple factors involved in school violence,” says Elodie Gentina, a researcher on Generation Z at the IÉSEG School of Management in Paris. “But seeing violent content online normalizes it for teens. When they see real-life violence, it becomes blasé for them. That can create a spiral of violence.”
Sweeping solutions
Social media use has educators increasingly worried, about both the detrimental effects on their students and how that affects their classrooms.
“There are so many kids who can’t measure violence anymore or the consequences of their actions, because they’re living in a virtual world,” says Kamel Chabane, a junior high school history and geography teacher in central Paris. “I see the importance that phones and social media has taken in their lives.”
More and more educators are pushing to remove cellphones from classrooms entirely, saying they not only are a distraction but can also encourage violent and aggressive behaviors, such as harassment and bullying.
“When it comes to conflict or harassment, cellphones and social media have created an added layer of complexity,” says Laura Sabourdy, the coordinator of extracurricular programming at a junior high in Libourne, France. She says incidents taking place behind a screen are harder to spot – and confront – than real-life incidents of violence.
There is currently no Europe-wide mandate regarding the use of smartphones within academic establishments, so those rules are left to individual member states. Italy has banned phones from preschool to secondary school, while the Netherlands bans classroom use of smartphones unless for educational or exceptional purposes.
This September, the French government announced that junior high schools will be required to implement measures to remove students’ phones at the start of each day – by storing them in a container, locker, or special envelope.
Despite such efforts, some are skeptical about the effectiveness of such measures. A recent study in The Lancet’s Regional Health Europe journal found that phone restrictions at school did not lower the overall amount of time young people spent on their devices during the day. And a 2024 review of school smartphone bans found little evidence that they had significant effect on children’s mental well-being.
European governments are also weighing broader social media bans for teens. Following the June 10 attack in Nogent, French President Emmanuel Macron joined Greece and Spain in calling for an urgent Europe-wide ban on social media use for those under age 15. The European Commission has supported the measure and plans to task a panel of experts with studying the legal mechanisms for implementing such a ban across the bloc. In the absence of a Europe-wide response, national governments in France, Ireland, Spain, and Greece are also working on their own individual measures.
“We have everything we need to [ban social media to teens], and we need to do this,” says Justine Atlan, director of the French children’s online-protection group E-Enfance, who has been working with the French government to create an online age-verification system in France. “Right now, children’s rights are not being respected. We need a balanced response, and we need the government on board.”
But even if a social media ban were implemented, it’s doubtful that it would stop teens from finding ways to socialize online. For example, NPR recently discovered that some enterprising teenagers had turned the comment sections of its years-old podcasts into their own private chat rooms.
Parent-teacher partnerships
Ms. Roshdi, the forensic psychologist, says there needs to be more interdisciplinary cooperation between schools, parents, and administrators – instead of putting the onus on social media and smartphones.
That means providing more information to parents and teachers on how to spot behavioral problems in students, and coordinating with the appropriate professionals so teens can get the help they need – before it’s too late.
Europe also is experiencing a shortage of in-school specialists to help students navigate difficult issues and events. But the schools are finding other ways to manage for the time being.
Susann Haverland, an English and Spanish teacher in Göttingen, Germany, says her school has created a five-person support staff to provide resources and counseling. Other teachers say reinforcing nonacademic skills is equally important in making sure teens don’t act out on violent emotions.
“We need to teach teens civic responsibility and good values,” says Mr. Chabane, the Parisian teacher. “They need to know that authority and rules need to be respected, and how to live with one another in society.”
Teachers say they can’t do it alone. They need the participation of parents when it comes to controlling their children’s smartphone use and signaling concerns about kids’ mental well-being to teachers. But that hasn’t been easy, as it requires a shift in thought about the boundaries between school and family in French society.
“There is this idea in France that teachers should stick to teaching academic subjects, and leave the teaching of morals and values to parents,” says Jean-André Lasserre, a former president of the Paris branch of the FCPE parents organization. “But the two don’t need to be mutually exclusive. There should be a continuum between home and school. We need to create a collective effort.”
