Denunciations of gender-based and sexual violence increased sharply in 2021, in a context of freedom of speech for victims and better consideration of their testimonies, according to the report “Insecurity and delinquency” published Thursday, June 30 by the Service ministerial statistics for internal security attached to the Ministry of the Interior.
“The very marked upward trend” complaints of sexual violence will only be confirmed in 2021, note the statisticians. They concern nearly 79,000 facts in 2021, an increase of 33% in one year, denouncing both rape, attempted rape and sexual assault. They had already increased by 19% in 2018, 12% in 2019 and 3% in 2020, a year marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and two confinements.
Interestingly, more and more people are filing complaints for facts dating back more than five years: 19% in 2021, compared to 13% in 2018, or even 11% in 2016. The share of complaints concerning sexual violence suffered while the victims were minors at the time of the events, increasing by 27% in one year. And almost a third of this violence took place within the family.
Similarly, complaints of domestic violence are increasing. In detail, reports of all types of intentional assault and battery against people aged 15 or over increased in 2021 (more than 300,000 incidents), but the share of intra-family violence is increasingly significant: it now accounts for more than half of cases of intentional assault and battery, compared to 43% in 2016. This violence within the family is rising sharply in 2021 (+14% in one year), after already two consecutive years of increase ( +10% in 2020 and +14% in 2019).
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The victims of this intra-family violence are almost exclusively women (84% of victims) and nine out of ten of these women have been hit by their spouse. Men who are victims of intentional assault and battery are more so outside the family circle.
On the other hand, whatever the gender of the victims, the perpetrators of this violence are almost exclusively men: nearly nine out of ten for intentional assault and 97% for sexual violence. They are most often adults and mostly of French nationality.
Statisticians from the Ministry of the Interior believe that the increase in complaints of sexual and intra-family violence is due to a context of freedom of speech since the appearance of the #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc movements on social networks, as well as greater media coverage of cases of sexual violence.
They also see in it “a positive effect of the Grenelle of domestic violence, via the improvement of the policy of reception of victims by the security services, better articulation with social workers and hospitals and a greater incentive to file complaint”.
But, despite the increase in denunciations, they still observe that the number of complaints for gender-based and sexual violence is still far from the victimization figures and that it “still greatly underestimates the phenomenon”. For example, according to the “Living environment and security” survey for the period 2016-2018, less than one in six victims of sexual violence files a complaint.
In this crime report, the Ministry of the Interior also notes that homicides increased by 7% in 2021, going from 787 to 842 victims in one year. Two-thirds of the victims are men, as are the majority of suspects. Also note the very sharp increase in scams (+15%), with more than 400,000 victims in 2021, mostly individuals.