(cont.) “Depardieu, he’s a monument of French cinema, and there was a whole system to protect people, but particularly him,” said Anne-Cécile Mailfert, the president of the Women’s Foundation, a nonprofit in central Paris that houses many women’s rights associations and funds feminist community projects across the country.
Ms. Mailfert said the highly publicized trial exposed the public to misogynistic defense tactics that victims commonly face in court and the deficiencies of the criminal system when it comes to addressing sexual violence.
But much bigger changes are needed, she said.
In fact, while the number of sexual violence cases has surged in France, so, too, has the percentage of cases that are thrown out by investigators — climbing to 94 percent in 2020 from 82 percent in 2012, according to a report by the Institute for Public Policy in Paris.
“We are confronted by a wall of justice that we can’t get through because they absolutely do not want to put the resources needed to treat all these complaints,” Ms. Mailfert said. “They say there are too many complaints. But if there are too many complaints, it’s because there’s too much rape.”
Her organization launched a broad campaign demanding that the government make major reforms and commitments to combat sexual violence in education and enhance child protection, victim support and, notably, the judicial system. The annual estimated cost is 2.6 billion euros ($2.9 billion) — money the government, to date, has been unwilling to spend.
“We haven’t had our #MeToo,” Ms. Dancourt said. “We speak out, we talk about the abuse, but it hasn’t been followed by a political will. There is no urgency when it comes to sexist and sexual violence.”
Some systemic changes have started to take place, particularly in the wake of the mass trial in which 51 men were convicted, most for raping Gisèle Pelicot after she had been drugged by her husband at the time.
This spring, the government approved a robust curriculum for mandatory sex education classes for the first time, that focus on the prevention of sexism and sexual violence.
A law introducing the concept of consent into the legal definition of rape in France was passed by the lower house of Parliament in April and is awaiting debate in the Senate.
And Ms. Rousseau, the lawmaker, recently ended a six-month parliamentary investigation into sexist and sexual violence in France’s cultural sectors. It was the first #MeToo in-depth examination of the industry. It found that sexual violence was endemic in the country’s cinema and that, while victims had spoken up for years, the people in power had refused to listen.
Among the committee’s 89 recommendations, many target the larger justice system. The include offering financial aid to victims of sexual violence so they can pay for lawyers.
The report took aim at the “cult of genius creator” status in France that created a “breeding ground of abuse of power and a feeling of impunity.”
“People are realizing that the ‘exception française” has meant we are 10 years late in addressing #MeToo,” said Ms. Murat, the academic, who is French. “There is something that is very slowly changing in French society and that young people are realizing it’s not tolerable anymore.”
