A radio campaign detailing harrowing experiences and a call from President Francois Hollande to "face up to harassment" show that France still has much to do tackle the widespread denial of violence against women. The radio campaign has been organised by the Feminist Collective Against Rape, who are hoping victims who feel ashamed -- or somehow to blame for their own abuse -- can be encourage to speak out.
The group believes that in France more than 86,000 women a year are victims of rape or attempted rape, but only 13 percent complain to police and just one percent of those complaints leads to a conviction. But due to the disparity between the number of suspected offences and the number that go punished, the group is calling for each complaint to be systematically investigated. It also wants sex attacks to be classed as a crime and not merely an offence, which under French law carries lighter penalties.
In France, a rape -- defined as "any act of sexual penetration, regardless of its nature" that is committed "by violence, constraint, threat or surprise" -- is a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. That can rise to 20 years if there are aggravating circumstances, such as rape by a partner, or the rape of a victim who is pregnant or suffering from an illness.
To mark International Women's Day on Tuesday, President Hollande has taken to the pages of a women's magazine for the first time in his four years in power to admit that harassment of women is "scandalously trivialised" by French society.
But is France really a country where "the sexist myth of a naturally violent sexual masculinity" persists, as the study on the perception of rape darkly concluded? Francois de Singly, a sociologist, said: "Society puts on a pedestal the notion of virility, which contains a logic of the sort of violence you find in war, in competition and in sexuality. And no-one dares say that this virility should be condemned." He wants a rethink in the way boys are educated in France because he believes that historically they have been brought up to believe that "force is legitimate".
