Last year, the police and gendarmerie services registered more than 70,000 complaints of sexual violence committed outside the family setting.
SourceAFP
© VALLAURI Nicolas / MAXPPP / PHOTOPQR/LA PROVENCE/MAXPPP
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71,835 is the number of complaints recorded in 2021 for sexual crimes or offenses committed outside the family setting. This represents an increase of 24.1% compared to 2020, according to figures from the Ministry of the Interior released on Wednesday, November 30. After stagnating between 2019 and 2020, a year marked by the health crisis, the number of complaints resumed its very strong growth that began in 2017.
The facts denounced are for a large majority (73%) physical sexual violence (rape or attempted rape, assault or sexual assault) and the declared victims are for the most part women (86%) and for more than half minors (55%), according to this study by the Beauvau statistical service (SSMSI).
40.7% of facts are time-barred
These figures must be contextualized with the low propensity of victims to report the facts they suffered. “Less than 10% of victims of sexual violence committed outside the family setting file a complaint,” underlines the SSMSI. More and more victims are filing a complaint several weeks, months or years after the commission of the facts denounced. Thus, acts committed before 2021 represented 40.7% of sexual offenses outside the family setting recorded. In 2017, this figure was 31.8%.
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An increase which is “in the context of free speech driven by the #MeToo movement from 2017-2018”, notes the study.Women are more often victims in large cities. If the number of victims per inhabitant is very homogeneous between the different departments, Paris is an exception: the capital records a number of victims per inhabitant (from 15 to 64 years old) much higher than all the others, of 1.8 victims per 1,000 inhabitants, against an average of 1.1 in the rest of the country.
As for the perpetrators, 48,294 people were implicated in 2021 for these crimes and offences, almost exclusively men (96%), most often adults (73%).