TWO young women were sitting on the grass under a warm sun, taking photographs of each other with a digital camera.

“That’s my home,” one said while pointing at a council block in a middle-class suburb in the quaint and quiet town of Angers in the Loire Valley, western France.

“It is a great place to live and it is why the social services sent Franck and his family here. They thought it would do them good to be in a pleasant environment.” The woman shrugged. “They were wrong.”

In the first of what turned out to be a catalogue of appalling blunders by the authorities in Angers, Franck V was placed on the Saint-Léonard estate in the hope that he would rise out of depravity. Instead, he sank further into it, unnoticed by the social workers, medical professionals, judges, probation staff and police officers who were supposed to be supervising him and other defendants tried at Angers Criminal Court. His new flat became the centre of a paedophile ring of almost unimaginable barbarity.

“It’s unbelievable — unspeakable,” the woman said. “How could it have happened?” As the jury returned its verdict yesterday after a 4½-month trial, the same question was haunting France. Maître Pascal Rouiller, Franck V’s lawyer, said that the case illustrated the total breakdown of the French system for detecting and preventing child abuse. Along with 21 of the 23 families involved in the case, Franck V and his wife, Patricia, were known to the local council. In 1999, social services said they were incapable of protecting their dirty, lice-ridden children. Twelve professionals, including social workers, doctors, psychiatrists and special-needs teachers, were assigned to keep them under observation.

They moved the illiterate, drunken, unemployed Franck and his wife out of their noisy tower block to the Saint-Léonard estate. No one noticed anything strange in the behaviour of their daughter, Marine, who, the Angers court heard, was raped and abused at least 45 times between the ages of 4 and 7. Nobody raised the alert when Franck V’s father, Philippe, came to live with them, even though he had been given a 13-year prison sentence in 1991 for raping his son, and was soon assaulting his grandchildren.

Franck V’s friendship with Eric J, who had been jailed for abusing ten children in 1997, was also ignored. Under his parole conditions, Eric J was to stay away from his wife and children but he returned to live with them. He was meant to see a psychiatrist but did not. He was to remain in his home town but he moved away.

In three years Eric J raped and abused 27 children. He also helped Franck V and Patricia to turn a small paedophile ring into a much wider operation. They scoured the town looking for mothers prepared to prostitute their children, and for customers willing to pay for sex.

Eric J prostituted 35 children. He was arrested with other ringleaders in February 2002. In the spring of 2001, Eric J’s wife told a social worker that he had started to abuse their daughter. In the summer of that year, Franck V’s wife said her husband had committed similar acts with their daughter, Marine. The information was passed on to the local police child abuse unit. It took eight months for the unit to link the men, or even call them in for questioning. Only then did officers start to unravel the paedophile network.

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