After six years of procedure, appointments and letters, Shanley Clemot McLaren gave up. The 23-year-old spreads all her papers, her hands shaking, on a desk. The first document dates from 2016. The 17-year-old high school student that she was then filed a complaint against her 18-year-old boyfriend for physical violence and death threats. Then she filed a handrail, in November 2017, just after the birth of the #MeToo movement.
“When there was #MeToo, I understood that what I had been through was something that so many other women had been through. It helped me a lot, it gave me the strength to understand that you should not let go”explains Shanley, to franceinfo.
“And I thought with #MeToo there was going to be some change, that the justice system would take us seriously.”
Shanley Clemot McLarenat franceinfo
“And I just had a silence, says the young woman. TEveryone said to me: but that’s how it is when you file a complaint, the investigation takes time. And I waited, waited, waited…I never heard back.” And for good reason: his complaint is already closed. But Shanley only learns about it three years later.
After the confinement due to Covid-19, in 2020, she will inquire directly in court: “There, I received a paper which said: your complaint has been closed since May 12, 2017. Reason: reminder to the law by OPJ [officier de police judiciaire]. When I saw that, I collapsed in court. It means that for all these years, I’ve been fighting in a vacuum, trying to heal myself, waiting for something that was already over before I even put down the handrail.”
In the months that followed, Shanley tried again to relaunch the procedure assisted by the women’s house, without success. Today, tired, she gives up. “It’s a lot of money, it’s a lot of time, it’s ways to send all these documents, to follow up with the prosecutor, to try to find what are the alternatives, what are the tools, to pay a psychiatrist. And he has impunity, he does not have all this mental burden that I had for all these years. He had impunity while I am still recovering.
>> Five years of #MeToo: “Now we are talking about these subjects even if impunity remains a big problem”, recognizes Marlène Schiappa
His healing goes through commitment. Now a master’s student, Shanley is in turn helping other victims of gender-based and sexual violence through the association she created, #StopFisha. She accompanies them, including in their filing of a complaint at the police station.
It’s announcement time!
We are pleased to present to you the project we have been working on for several months. A collective work!
“Fighting cybersexism” will be released in bookstores on October 26, 2021.#StopFisha #CombatCybersexism pic.twitter.com/xQ3XyLRF87
— Stop Fisha (@StopFisha) September 14, 2021
“The judicial system must change, it is not up to it”, Shanley tells us. In fact, she’s not wrong. While the number of complaints has increased, most are still closed without action. Franceinfo has looked into complaints recorded by the courts for five years: although the number of sexual violence recorded by the police has soared by + 85% in 5 years.
>> #MeToo: Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, Luc Besson, Tariq Ramadan… Where is the justice in the main French cases?
And faced with this surge of testimonies, justice has not been up to par, denounce the associations. “#MeToo has sparked gigantic hope and #MeToo is starting to spark gigantic disappointment as well,” deplores Anne-Cécile Mailfert is the president of the Women’s Foundation.
“It would be unbearable for me if all these women who believed in it, who said to themselves: ‘ok, okay, I’m going! They’re going to listen to me’, take themselves, as they are taking themselves , the wall of justice, the wall of the police, the wall of institutions.”
Anne-Cécile Mailfert, President of the Women’s Foundationat franceinfo
Even today, seven out of ten cases of sexual violence do not result in a trial. For the associations, it is the sign of a justice that fails to listen to the victims. On the side of the Ministry of Justice, we qualify this observation: if there are still many classifications without follow-up, it is because the proofs remain difficult to establish. The facts take place most of the time behind closed doors and without witnesses.
>> #MeToo?
But this requirement of proof, justice must not renounce it, believes Laure Heinich, lawyer specializing in cases of sexual violence. “The proof remains the absolutely important element and when I often hear in public debates: we believe you, we believe you, it is extremely important from the point of view of my society that he has the support of the word of the women. But it has to be disconnected from the judicial process.”
“Justice is not there to believe people. It is there to find evidence and when there is a dismissal, an acquittal, a classification without follow-up, above all that does not mean: we do not believe you no. That means, there was no evidence.”
Laure Heinich, lawyerat franceinfo
Where everyone is in agreement, on the other hand, is on the question of means. Clearly, if there were more police officers and more specialized magistrates, investigations could be faster, more thorough and the evidence easier to find. Since #MeToo, things have changed all the same: 160,000 police and gendarmes have been trained, the government is also considering the creation of specialized courts. But the gap to be made up is too great. The associations are demanding to go even further.