Ouaissa writes that anger over the dilapidated state of schools was the starting point, but that the protest movement has widened to a broader segment of society whose grievances now include institutional racism and Islamophobia.
In one case she cites, 17 children spent the night of 20 October at the Bobigny police holding facility without bedding or mattresses.
She says that since 17 October an estimated 5,000 people have been arrested in connection with the protests, 85% of them minors, and that many have faced disproportionately harsh treatment in detention.
The column says the protests have been met with increasingly harsh repression and ever-larger deployments of security forces, including special police units and the military, and that the initial demonstrations were treated entirely as a matter of law and order — criminalised, not listened to. Ouaissa, writing as a French Muslim, says people like her live in fear because far-right hate speech goes unchecked, and that far-right political figures receive repeated exposure while communities on the receiving end often struggle to be heard.