Fiona Lazaar is a member of the Val d'Oise and vice-president of the La République en Marche group in the National Assembly. She is also vice-president of the Delegation for Women's Rights.
FIGAROVOX.- The term "feminicide" is used more and more in public debate. What is the origin of this word and what does it mean?
Fiona LAZAAR.- The notion of "feminicide" was theorized in the 1970s by Christian feminists. Since that time, it has been used in particular by feminist movements seeking to alert the authorities to the fact that a "feminicide" is not a murder like the others. The word has thus gradually returned to everyday language, in particular thanks to the censuses of the number of women murdered by their companions. If we look at the press titles of the last few years, we notice for example that the term "feminicide" has gradually replaced expressions like "marital drama" or "crime of passion", which gave the feeling of reducing the gravity of crimes against women. At the political level, I would like to recall that the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron is the first French Head of State to have used it, at the headquarters of 3919 (the listening, support and guidance line dedicated to women victims of domestic violence).
So you conducted a parliamentary fact-finding mission to judge the relevance or not of bringing this concept into criminal law?
Yes, this mission followed the work produced within the framework of the Grenelle on the fight against domestic violence, after a call for a state of emergency of domestic violence that I launched to the government in July 2019. In the As part of this parliamentary mission, I was able to observe the extent to which associations and the families of the victims wanted to contribute to the public debate on the issue.
Feminicide is not murder like any other because there is a continuum of violence.However, since one does not easily touch the Criminal Code, it was necessary to step back and ask the right questions. So I met many feminist activists, associations like UN Women and Dare Feminism, actors in the legal world, representatives of the National Judicial Union, lawyers, the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH ), the cabinet of Minister Marlène Schiappa or even Victoria Vanneau, an excellent historian of violence against women.
These actors have expressed a desire to generalize the use of the term "feminicide" in all spheres of society, including in institutions. Feminicide is not murder like any other because there is a continuum of violence, which goes from inequality and discrimination to the act of violence.
Can domestic violence really be explained by a desire to attack women as women?
Behind the word "feminicide", there are several definitions. Some will designate all murders of women as “feminicides”, while others will provide a much more targeted definition, insisting on the idea that a woman is murdered precisely because she is a woman. This last definition is generally accompanied by a reflection around the notions of "domination" and "objectification". I personally have a hard time finding a perfect definition.
For this reason, embedding this concept in law posed certain difficulties. It was also found that such a measure did not meet a need of the magistrates. Sufficient aggravating circumstances already exist today, which can even lead to the maximum penalty: "crime on a spouse", "sexist crime", etc. The inclusion of this notion in the Penal Code would therefore not have made it possible to better combat the phenomena that feminists rightly deplore.
The Criminal Code should not be a political tool that can be used improperly.Finally, this inclusion in the Criminal Code would have posed a problem with regard to the universality of the law. It was risky to create a legal inequality between the murder of a woman by a man, the murder of a man by a man and the murder of a man by a woman.
This therefore calls into question the argument of the “continuum” on violence against women that you mentioned above: that women are more often discriminated against is not enough to grant aggravating circumstances when a woman is killed…
Indeed, there is a gap between the militant will and the possibilities offered by the law. We have to be very careful because the Criminal Code should not be a political tool that can be used wrongly. There was a risk of unconstitutionality. However, I stress that the resurgence of the use of the term "feminicide" is a step in the right direction. And I hope that the world of justice will also be sensitive to this, particularly in the training of judges.
