In Trappes, fear settles into the kitchens, the schools and the stairwells

According to franceinfo, a France Télévisions team (the country's public broadcaster) spent several days in Trappes (Yvelines, a town west of Paris) after the racist attack of 23 October, to take the mood of residents. The headline of the report quotes a child: "I'm scared of being killed because I'm Muslim." The outlet describes a unease that is spreading among the youngest and the oldest alike, and the question that sums it up: how do you live with the feeling of having become a target?

In the dispatch we have, we have neither the details of the events, nor a death toll, nor the identity of anyone involved. We will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

Let us start with what that child's sentence says. A little girl who calculates the risk of being killed according to her religion is doing work no one should ask of her. This fear appears in no statistic, yet it occupies the evenings, the walks to school, the conversations at bedtime. Someone has to receive it, reassure her, and put it into words. Who? Most often, the mothers, the grandmothers, the neighbours, the childminders, the teachers. This is what Marxist feminism calls social reproduction: the work, unpaid or poorly paid, that makes and mends people, and that is filed outside the "economy". When violence strikes a neighbourhood, this work doubles, and no one counts it.

The elderly people, also quoted by franceinfo, carry another part of this load: that of memory and vigilance. They look after the little ones, do the shopping for the neighbour, keep watch. Yet this web of care holds in towns where public services, health, housing and schools are already stretched. When budgets shrink, the work does not disappear: it falls back on households, and first of all on women. Add fear to that, and the burden becomes mental in the most literal sense.

Then there is the uncomfortable question, that of racism. It does not fall from the sky: it thrives where people are taught to see the neighbour across the landing as a rival for a flat, a place in a nursery, a job that is becoming scarcer. Working-class estates, already relegated, serve as the backdrop for discourses that name culprits rather than policies. Setting against each other those who live the same end-of-month struggles is an old method, and it costs less than building schools. We are not saying here what motivated the perpetrator of the attack, which the dispatch does not detail; we are saying what soil these hatreds grow in.

The answer does not boil down to a minute's silence. It runs through concrete means: school psychologists in sufficient numbers, health centres kept open, youth workers paid properly, associations funded. So many feminised, precarious jobs, celebrated in times of mourning and forgotten when the budget is drawn up. As a resident quoted by franceinfo puts it in the article's headline: "How can you build a society with children who are afraid from the earliest age?" A good question. It is addressed to those who vote the budgets.