Her name was Rebecca, was 44 years old and was beaten to death in the North by her partner. Rebecca closes the sinister count of feminicides and becomes the 149th known victim of the past year, according to the collective "Feminicides by companions or ex" which lists in the regional press all the victims of these marital crimes. With 149 women killed, 2019 has 29 more victims than in 2018.
"But it is a minimum figure, warns Sandra, one of the administrators of this collective which publishes her accounts on Facebook. We did not count the missing women whose companions were imprisoned. And then in 2020, we will also discover cases dating from last year. "
According to an AFP study, at least 123 women were killed in 2019 in the context of domestic violence, a figure also put forward by the State Secretariat for Equality between women and men of Marlène Schiappa. Official Interior and Justice statistics are not yet available.
For Caroline De Haas of the collective #NousToutes, it is anyway "impossible to have exact figures". The activist points the finger at car accidents caused by spouses who are held back by road safety or even forced suicides. “Beyond the figures, what must be remembered is that there are many victims and that every two and a half days a woman is killed by her spouse or ex. "
Implementation of emergency measures from January 2020
As of last February, the volunteers of “Feminicides by companions or ex” alerted about the 20 women killed since the beginning of the year and Caroline de Haas took up the subject, giving it a spotlight and imposing it in the public debate.
Throughout the year, domestic violence sowed their victims behind them while the government announced in September the implementation of emergency measures in January 2020 (Editor's note: the anti-rapprochement bracelet, the creation of 1,000 new accommodation for victims and their children, the suspension of parental authority for the author) and that Marlène Schiappa was preparing the holding of a Grenelle of domestic violence, which was to bring together professionals and associations.
In late November, when tens of thousands of people demonstrated in France to say "stop" to domestic violence, the government presented its anti-feminicide plan: among other things, a risk assessment grid for police and gendarmes, the creation of a new aggravating circumstance for the authors pushing their spouse to suicide, the lifting of medical confidentiality ...
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But this string of measures is insufficient, say the activists. Caroline De Haas regrets, for example, that solutions are only provided "a posteriori": "Very little has been allocated to prevention, to the education of children". Same disappointment, from the group Feminicides by companions or ex: "Nothing is done for the families of the victims, those of the perpetrators and their children".
Grenelle leaves a bitter taste
"Never has any government, whatever it is, taken up this scourge of domestic violence," claims people in the entourage of Marlene Schiappa. They had never been a major public policy object […] and gender equality decreed a major cause of the President's five-year term. "
We also recall the billion euros committed by the government for equality between women and men in 2020, the 22 million granted to associations and the 361.5 million of credit allocated to the fight against domestic violence.
But on the association side, the Grenelle pill still has a bitter taste. Caroline de Haas considers that the word of the year is "Femicide" and is surprised that "the government still does not release sufficient means despite the awareness and historical mobilization" on the subject.
