"A blow of cock where I think would calm you down", "You will never be a French dirty whore", "Suicide yourself"... On the Instagram page @BalanceTonIntimidation, hate messages addressed to Green MPs are displayed on backgrounds colorful.
Behind these shocking posts, revealing the extent of the violence of the messages received by Sandrine Rousseau, Sandra Regol, Sabrina Sebaihi, Cyrielle Chatelain, Lisa Belluco, Marie-Charlotte Garin and Julie Laernoes, there is Marion Nadaud, the communications director of the left.
Reached by telephone, she tells
Madame Figaro
the genesis of this initiative, her ambitions and her perception of activism.
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“I had no right to be silent”
Close to Sandrine Rousseau for several years, Marion Nadaud already knew the subject of violence on social networks, publicly mentioned several times by the former presidential candidate.
But in recent months, she has seen this reality become a suffering for the female politician.
Over the course of the discussions, she realized that all the women in her party (the only one with a majority of women in the Assembly) were subjected to this same daily violence.
A relentlessness online, mainly, which occurs as soon as they speak.
“Sabrina Sebaihi was elected MP.
The next day, she received a letter of racist insults, ”she says.
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The idea of creating the account arose as an impulse.
"It needed to come out", "we had to do it", "we had to break the silence", repeats Marion Nadaud.
An initiative also motivated by a certain sense of duty.
“I said to myself that I, as a communicator and a feminist, I had no right to be silent,” she explains.
“Not to be silent”, “to come out of silence”, these words come back like a leitmotif.
“These people who send these messages are counting on our silence and our inaction”, adds the founder of the account, for whom “using social networks is a way of turning their tool against them”.
In reality, it is not only on social networks that this violence is expressed.
Letters, emails, tweets... all the channels of the seven deputies whose messages Marion Nadaud publishes are infested with misogynistic, racist and grossophobic insults.
“Put the words as they are like 'dirty bitch' or 'bitch', it makes people react.
People knew there was violence but not to this extent, “says the communicator.
The Cultural Battle of Anonymity
If we must denounce the violence, we must also denounce the perpetrators.
This is why the collaborator of Sandrine Rousseau chose to publish, in story, the identity of the senders.
"
I consider that these people do not have to remain anonymous", she explains before asking the fateful question: "would they allow themselves such violence if they were not so anonymous and protected?”
The founder of the account responds to this by referring to the documentary
La Fabrique dulie: Affaire Johnny Depp / Amber Heard
, which demonstrates, according to her, that “with social networks, there is a misogynistic word that unlocks and it is frightening ".
“A systemic concern”
If the 7 deputies who contribute to this Instagram account have, according to its creator, "immediately accepted", they had never thought of the idea of making these messages public.
In question, according to the activist, a form of resignation that women politicians have towards violence.
Moreover, before the creation of this account, to protect themselves from it, the latter avoided reading the comments written on their social networks.
A resignation reinforced by the absence of tools to deal with it.
“Justice is not adapted, complaints do not succeed”, which leads to “accepting the worst”, she specifies.
This account is then a way to say "this is not normal" and "you are not alone".
For the former communication director of Yannick Jadot's campaign, it's obvious: “It's a systemic subject.
All women politicians, if they started to look at the comments, would find horrors.
Therefore, this platform, which she describes as a space of solidarity and sisterhood, could very well welcome the testimonies of female politicians from other sides.
“This word needs to be heard, to be perceived and I think that violence has no borders”.
“We have to accept that we will always be in the fight”
In the political field, the initiative was well received, even by collaborators of other parties.
These approving returns, Marion Nadaud associates them with the effects of political #MeToo.
According to her, this movement has made it possible to point the finger at gender-based violence which particularly affects the political domain, “very patriarchal in its mode of operation”.
But for the communicator, even if mentalities seem to be moving in the right direction, the feminist struggle must never stop.
“We have to stop thinking 'that's it, it's done', and accept that we will always be in the fight”.
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