Grandstand. For a long time, I said that French institutions experienced “dysfunctions” in terms of reception and care for victims of sexual violence. To speak of “dysfunctions” is to recognize that there are certainly problems, but it is also to say that they are identified, limited to a few people or departments.
In reality, we are not facing a few “dysfunctions”, but a structural and massive failure of our institutions.
Refusals – however illegal – to take complaints by the police are no exception. In 2018, in a survey entitled “payetaplainte”, 60% of people who testified said they had faced a refusal to take their complaint. In the testimonies that are multiplying on social networks, in particular with the hashtag #doublepeine, the systemic return to the trivialization of violence, the humiliation and the guilt of the victims.
“You will ruin his life”
A woman victim of rape told me the words of a police officer, in Paris, in December 2021, when filing a complaint: “You know you’re going to ruin his life? » We get testimonials like this all the time. The flow is uninterrupted.
When the complaint is taken, the statistics of the Ministry of Justice show that it has very little chance of succeeding. One Department of Justice report showed, in 2019, that in 80% of cases of feminicide, when women had filed a complaint, their complaints had been dismissed. Law enforcement and the judiciary did not take their complaints seriously. They were murdered.
When the complaint is processed, justice will tend to disqualify the facts. A crime will be judged as a misdemeanor, in the correctional court and not in the assize court. An uncle was sentenced in early 2022 for raping his niece, in front of her sister. The facts are materialized, proven. Justice has however decided to disqualify the facts, judging the pedophile act, as a sexual assault.
It’s not new. In Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis), almost half of the sexual assaults judged in 2013 and 2014 were, in reality, rapes. Our institutions disqualify the violence with all their might, sending the message that basically it is not that serious.
Humiliated at the police station
In these institutions, people work, often with derisory means, to help the victims of sexual violence, so that the system does not crush them a little more. Women and men who apply the law. Despite all their energy, they are unable to reverse the situation.
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