In the first study of its kind in France, a public agency dedicated to researching criminality trends has collated data from police investigations into the murders of women to establish the relationships between the victims and their killers.
The report published on September 27th by the French national observatory of delinquency and penal response (l’Observatoire national de la délinquance et des réponses pénales), the ONDRP, a research body that operates under the authority of the prime minister’s office, found that more than half of the 286 murders of women in France in 2015 (a total excluding those who were victims of terrorist attacks), were perpetrated by members of their domestic entourage.
The separate investigations by the French national police force and gendarmerie into the murders in 2015, which includes cases which have not yet been heard in court, concluded that husbands or domestic partners were the suspects in 30.8% of the crimes, while another 21.3% of the cases implicated other family members. In the case of victims aged between 15 and 35, husbands or partners were the identified as the perpetrators of 96% of murders, while for those women victims aged between 36 and 55, husbands and partners represented 88% of those identified as their murderers.
In the cases of murders of women aged over 55, husbands and domestic partners made up 55% of the identified killers.
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“This confirms that women are in greater danger in their homes or their boyfriend’s homes than inside a carpark at 10pm,” commented Ernestine Ronai, a member of the French government’s High Council for Equality between Men and Women (HCE), and who is also the head of a local branch of the Observatory of violence against women in the Seine-Saint-Denis département (county) north of Paris. “The home, which should be a place of safety, has become that of every danger,” she added.
Separate research by the French national demographic studies institute (INED) into crimes of rape and sexual assault, published as a report in 2016, found that 75% of women who were subjected to rape or attempted rape in 2015 were the victims of members of their family or close entourage (husbands, partners, and ex-husbands).
“It is the youngest [women] who are the most victims of conjugal homicides, because it is the moment that they enter amorous relationships,” said Françoise Brié, also a member of the HCE and spokeswoman for the French national federation for women’s solidarity (Fédération nationale solidarité femmes), the FNSF. “It is also the moment when they have children, which means that in the case of violence they will remain in the conjugal home for longer.” She says that it is a challenge for the FNSF to make contact with young women in danger at home because it is “mostly older women” who call the federation’s national hotline for women victims of violence (39 19 when dialing within France).
The study by the French national observatory of delinquency and penal response, the ONDRP, found that the link between women victims of murder and their suspected killers varies widely according to their social surrounds. In rural areas, 73% of the victims in 2015 were murdered within their family environment, compared with 52% in urban areas not including Paris, and 20% in Paris and its wider region. “In rural zones, women are more isolated, perhaps less in public spaces,” observed Françoise Brié. “Access to public services, to transport, is very limited, and separation is often complicated, notably on farms.”
In the case of the Paris region, the cases of murders of women differed with other areas of France in that relatively few identified perpetrators were from the victims’ family or close entourages, according to Vincent Delbecque, head of the ONDRP’s criminology studies. The Parisian urban unit is a densely populated region where one has more interaction with people outside of the family,” he said. “Other demographic factors can enter into account, such as a younger population which proportionately fewer couples.”
When including victims of terrorist attacks, a total of 872 women were murdered in France in 2015, which represented half the number who were murdered in 1995. No similar research has been carried out into the nature of murders of men in France. However, a United Nations global study of homicides in 2012, which was published in 2013, found that members of the family of women victims of murder were identified as the perpetrators in 47% of cases, compared with just 6% of the cases of murders of men.
Beginning in 2004, the French interior ministry’s “victims’ delegation” publishes yearly figures on the number of deaths caused by violence among couples living together. The data is based on information passed on by police and gendarmerie services, along with a study of other sources, including media reports. But the research by the ONDRP involved a different approach. Using newly introduced computer software, the police and gendarmerie are now required to enter information of murder cases, including the gender of victims, their ages, the locations in which the crimes are committed, and a summary of the circumstances, for the attention of the interior ministry’s statistical research services, the SSMI. It is from this that the ONDRP was able to carry out the first national study of its kind into the murders of women.
However, the data it has compiled should be treated with a degree of caution. While the interior ministry’s “victims’ delegation” identified a total of 122 women who were murdered by their current or ex- husbands or partners in 2015, the figure recorded by the SSMI was 88, representing a significant discrepancy. “The ministerial services are in the process of working on this,” said Vincent Delbecque. “If, at the moment of the extraction [of information] the perpetrator of the homicide is unknown, they are indicated in the police report as “another relation”, so it is “at least” 88 women who were killed by their partner. Also, the homicide as reported in the press will not necessarily be that which is upheld by the investigators.” In short, the study’s already alarming conclusions are an underestimation of the true extent of murders of women committed by family members.
Françoise Brié argues that in order to reduce the number of cases, it is vital to maintain the different structures, such as hotlines, advice centres and shelters “because it is important to respond to women as of the moment when they begin to talk about violence”, and deplored what she said was a decline in public resources allocated to helping women in danger.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse