Gruesome injuries throw spotlight on France’s policing of high school protests

PARIS — The police tear gas grenade shattered the 14-year-old’s jaw and many of his teeth. The officer who fired it was taken into custody a week later and charged with violent mutilation, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Following surgery, the boy cannot speak and can only eat with a straw, his mother says.

Other adolescents have also suffered life-changing injuries blamed on police weaponry during nationwide protests by high school students demanding more funding for run-down schools. In the former mining town of Lens, a 15-year-old lost a hand in an incident involving a police stun grenade. In Tours, in the wine-making Loire region, the prosecutor there says a police riot-control round is suspected in the partial blinding of a 16-year-old.

Beyond physical wounds, the massive use of police arrests and tactics that government critics and human rights campaigners allege have been unnecessarily violent is giving a generation of French schoolchildren — and soon-to-be voters — a real-life education about state power and their rights as citizens, and how the two sometimes clash.

“It politicizes you at an incredible speed,” said Alexis Baudelin, a Paris attorney for more than a dozen youngsters taken into custody.

“For…

Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/world