“The government’s silence scandalizes us”, declares Sunday January 2 on franceinfo Lena Ben Ahmed of the collective #NousToutes. After 113 feminicides in 2021, the year 2022 began with three new suspicions of feminicides in two days. “It’s a whole system that allows murder since it has trivialized and minimized gender-based and sexual violence”, says Lena Ben Ahmed.
franceinfo: What shocks you the most this evening: the continuity of these crimes or the lack of reaction from the government?
Lena Ben Ahmed: First of all, I would like to say that these feminicides are not isolated cases. These are not news items, they are systemic violence. It is a whole system that allows murder since it has trivialized and minimized the gender-based and sexual violence that occurs upstream. So, indeed, the government’s silence scandalizes us. Five years after the great cause of the five-year term, not much has been done. There was no public policy up to the task and we can see a real gap between the measures put in place and the reality of violence in France.
Anti-reconciliation bracelets and training for police officers are not enough?
There are 379 anti-reconciliation bracelets while there are 220,000 women victims of violence each year in France. So, it is very good for women that it protects, but it is really minimal compared to all the other women victims of violence. What we also notice is that there are a lot of repressive policies. The measures therefore come after the violence. What we are asking is to prevent violence in order to eradicate the problem at the source well before the murder.
How to prevent this violence that you say is systemic?
It is necessary to set up training, education, prevention from an early age, in schools, high schools, and colleges. At #NousToutes, we offer a certificate of non-violence and train all the staff who take care of victims, whether they are the police, judges, nursing staff, so that they are able to provide responses and also be able to detect violence before it leads to more serious violence.
Do you hope that the presidential candidates will really take hold of this subject?
Obviously, presidential candidates are called upon to make concrete commitments that contain human, financial and material resources to deal with this issue of gender-based and sexual violence.