New figures are being introduced into the current debate on the relevance or otherwise of introducing the notion of consent into the definition of rape. According to a new note from the Institute of Public Policies, unveiled on Wednesday April 3, the rate of dismissal of cases of sexual violence amounts to 86%, reaching even 94% for rape. In question, mainly: “insufficiently characterized” offenses.
The author, Maëlle Stricot, doctoral student at the Paris School of Economics and affiliated with the Institute of Public Policies, has dissected a million cases of sexual violence and domestic violence handled by public prosecutors between 2012 and 2021 – a decade marked by an unprecedented influx of this type of files after 2017, in the wake of #metoo. A third of the corpus concerns sexual violence (rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment) and two thirds domestic violence.
Taking various forms (physical, psychological violence, control, etc.), these are generally part of a logic of domination within the couple. The researcher was interested in their legal treatment, from the filing of a complaint or the report, to the dismissal of proceedings or the passage to the criminal court or to the juvenile court. The rapes – few in number – tried at the assizes or having been dismissed are not studied.
“Insufficiently characterized offense”
Common features appear in all these files. Their gendered dimension, already widely documented, is once again indisputable: “On average, 83% of all victims of sexual violence whose sex is known are women, and this figure rises to 91% for domestic violence. » Conversely, of the 970,000 people implicated over the period, “the vast majority are men (94% for sexual violence and 88% for domestic violence)”.
When the perpetrators are prosecuted, they are often convicted, the note also notes. But the publication focuses above all on highlighting the significant number of dismissals that these situations encounter, an aspect regularly denounced by victims and their supporters. And rightly so: their rate is high not only for sexual violence, but also for domestic violence, reaching 72% on average for the latter over the entire period considered by the Institute.
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