On Wednesday, May 6, 2026, about a hundred high school girls gathered at 7 a.m. in front of a high school in Les Abymes. To say no to a list.
The day before, on May 5, a document had begun circulating on social media among students. It contained photos of nearly 80 high school girls, taken without their consent, sorted, categorized, and annotated. Categories invented by boys at the school. Among the captions noted by Outre-mer la 1ère: “two Ballon d’Ors,” “WAAAF WAAAF,” “I wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole,” and others, even more vulgar, of an explicitly sexist and sexual nature. Photos of real girls, students with names and faces, paired with comments designed to hurt, belittle, and humiliate.
The school administration launched an internal investigation. The alleged perpetrators were quickly identified. A complaint was filed by the school, and the victims’ families were encouraged to do the same.
But the girls themselves didn’t wait for the administration to act.
The internet, it stays
A 17-year-old high school student was there that morning. She explained on camera that they had tried to limit the spread, to alert others, to delete the images. Too late. “The internet, it stays,” she said. A simple sentence that sums up the problem in all its brutality.
That is exactly it, the trap of this form of violence: it doesn’t go away. A photo associated with a degrading category can continue to circulate years after the incident, etching itself into memories, search results, and conversations. It sticks to the skin of a girl who didn’t choose it, who didn’t want it, who didn’t even know she was being watched.
This isn’t a teenage prank. It’s an assault on dignity, the distribution of images without consent, a form of collective cyberbullying. And the fact that it circulates “among students” doesn’t make it harmless. It makes it an everyday occurrence.
This isn’t an isolated phenomenon
Another young girl, also on the list, put it into words during the protest. She spoke of “incels”, men who build an identity around rejection by women and turn that rejection into hatred. It’s not a term one would expect to hear from a high school girl in Guadeloupe on a May morning, and yet there it is, precise, lucid.
The phenomenon she describes, however, is not local. It crosses borders, social classes, and educational levels. In early 2025, the journal Culture Compliance published a study on incel ideology and social media, showing how these digital spaces have transformed individual frustrations into a collective rhetoric of misogyny1ère. What researchers call the “manosphere”, this ecosystem of forums, TikTok accounts, and influencers promoting a masculinity built on domination, is affecting boys at increasingly younger ages.
The British series Adolescence, released on Netflix in March 2025 and viewed over 140 million times in just a few weeks, depicts exactly this mechanism: a 13-year-old boy who turns to violence under the influence of this online culture. Its global success has led the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Flemish Belgium, and now France to use it as an educational tool in schools. In June 2025, Minister of National Education Elisabeth Borne announced that the rights had been granted to French teachers.
The question is therefore no longer whether this phenomenon exists. It exists, it is growing, and it is reaching high school classrooms.
Sexism begins in school
Nor is this a surprise to anyone who reads the available data. The annual report from the High Council for Gender Equality has stated this every year since 2019, and the 2024 edition was particularly stark: sexism in France is not declining; it is on the rise. Among the most concerning indicators are stereotypes among young people, amplified by social media and what the report calls its role as a “megaphone.”
School is not a space immune to all of this. School climate surveys conducted in high schools in 2022–2023 by the Ministry of National Education show that girls are more likely to be victims of sexist insults than their male peers, and that among the violence they experience, sexual violence is overrepresented. National figures, valid across the entire country.
A researcher from the Canopé network, drawing on a benchmark study on behavior in school settings, notes that some adults within the institution do not perceive these behaviors as violence, that boys use “sexualized language to trivialize the insult,” and that this trivialization is often dismissed with “it’s just a joke.”
It wasn’t a joke. Eighty girls know that.
What this list really says
Ranking women, dividing them into categories based on their supposed desirability, their bodies, their perceived accessibility this is as old as misogyny itself. What is new is the speed of dissemination, the scale of the audience, and the permanent mark it leaves.
What is also new, and this may be a sign of change, is the girls’ reaction. They didn’t stay silent; they didn’t wait for an adult to tell them what to do. They got up at dawn, went to the front of their high school, and called out what they were enduring.
This is precisely what the authors of this list did not anticipate. They thought they were creating a ranking. They sparked a mobilization.
This is not about stigmatizing a generation of boys or reducing this issue to a “Caribbean crisis” or a local peculiarity. What happened at this high school on May 5, 2026, is a true reflection of a global trend: misogynistic content circulating online, teenagers internalizing it, and girls paying the price with their bodies, their reputations, and their daily school lives.
The question this event raises is not “how to punish the guilty,” even though the issue of punishment is legitimate and necessary. The question is: what have we shown these boys that led them to find this acceptable? What algorithms have fed their news feeds? Which influencers have sold them the idea that women are objects to be rated?
And above all: what are we doing now, concretely, in high schools, so that the next generation doesn’t have to protest at 7 a.m. to demand the right to exist without being categorized?