Pierre-Marie Sève is director of the Institute for Justice, an association working for justice reform and the fight against crime.
This Sunday, February 4, a general practitioner left a patient's home in a city in Toulon.
On the way to his car, he sees a trash fire in the middle of the city.
Without thinking, he takes out his phone and takes a simple photo.
He is then spotted and then violently attacked: kicked and punched, several attackers attack him.
The victim screams as a doctor and tries to flee to his car.
While he tries to show his doctor's license plate, one of the attackers finally manages to calm the others and allow him to flee.
As a result of this traumatic attack for this practitioner, but also for his colleagues, SOS Docteurs du Var has made the decision to no longer intervene in certain difficult cities.
Also read: France in 2023, under the sign of violence and insecurity
It would be reassuring to believe that this attack was only an isolated incident.
It is not so.
For around twenty years, statistics of violence against doctors have been driving the counters into panic, without the authorities taking stock of them.
Indeed, the National Order of Physicians keeps the physician safety observatory up to date.
And according to this, the year 2022 constituted an absolute record in terms of attacks: 1,244 were recorded, a number which has doubled in 20 years.
Only 638 incidents were recorded in 2003.
Furthermore, this number is underestimated because it is only based on spontaneous declarations from doctors.
Thus, according to academic studies on the issue, the reporting rate is between 40 and 60% and we can reasonably assume that there would in reality be twice as many attacks as this public number.
And as the president of SOS Médecins Var also noted, this problem takes on an even more urgent character as the medical profession becomes more feminized.
At first glance, violence against caregivers may be surprising.
Shouldn't the medical vocation - and the altruism that it often implies - ward off the animosity of the population?
In reality, in a context where the number of attacks has increased eightfold between 1988 and 2023, violence unfortunately has no reason to spare one or other strata of society.
Pierre-Marie Sève
Logically yes, but, in the slump of violence against people that France is experiencing, can we be surprised that this profession is also affected?
Unfortunately, she is not the only one committed to helping others to suffer the increase in violence.
Indeed, in 2021, the firefighters also placed the increase in violence at the center of their annual congress.
Their unanimously shared feelings on the ground were confirmed by the figures from the National Penal Response Observatory: attacks on firefighters increased threefold between 2008 and 2018, the latest year available.
A 2019 Senate report sadly explained the phenomenon:
“it is no longer just a question of insults or verbal violence, but of real ambushes: throwing stones, molotov cocktails or concrete blocks, attacks with weapons whitewash or even attacks and destruction of vehicles and emergency centers
.
The doctors and firefighters therefore join the teachers, bereaved in recent years by the death of Dominique Bernard in Arras, of Agnès Lassalle in Saint Jean-de-Luz or of course of Samuel Paty.
These extremely serious crimes followed several decades of alarming levels of incident reporting.
Also read: Alain Bauer: “Violence becomes background music that ruins everyday life”
In reality, in a context where the number of attacks has increased eightfold between 1988 and 2023, violence unfortunately has no reason to spare one or other strata of society.
Following the Toulon affair, the general secretary of SOS Médocs spoke about the recruitment of security guards at the entrance to SOS Médocs buildings:
“It’s sad but the question arises
,” he declared. at Europe 1.
Very fashionable in France, the recruitment of security guards or the installation of surveillance cameras effectively makes it possible to secure sensitive places such as hospitals, supermarkets or train stations.
But these means only push crime back to their doors, where those who do not have the means to protect themselves live.
Furthermore, all these technical means make us forget that a certain France, until the 1960s, recorded crime rates 3 to 4 times lower than those of today, without today's financial and technological means. .
In reality, to overcome insecurity whatever it may be, the recipe is known: relentless criminal justice whose priority is neither the reintegration of criminals at all costs, nor hotel management of prisons, but quite simply neutralization active criminals.