The case against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, charged in May with the assault and attempted rape of a New York hotel chambermaid, appears close to collapse after the alleged victim's credibility was all but destroyed by a prosecutors' investigation. The handling of the case, by the New York Special Victims Unit and District Attorney's office, has come in for sharp criticism from some in France, where Strauss-Kahn's perp walk, initial imprisonment and subsequent house arrest were seen to be harsh, humiliating and ultimately unjust. So just how do the French handle such cases? Carine Fouteau reports.
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The New York Police Department's Special Victim’s Unit has no equivalent in France. The NYPD team works with another dedicated team, that of prosecutors and called the Sex Crimes Unit, altogether involving a staff of some 250 people. They are trained and exclusively concerned by crimes of sexual assault, and notably rape.
These are dealt with in France by the Police Judicière, more coomonly known as the PJ. Specially selected, these police officers [1] investigate felonies, including but not only, rape and attempted rape. In France, the aim is the same as in New York - to ensure the veracity of the facts and to find the guilty party - but the working methods are quite different.
The investigators and the magistrates are not specialised, they are rarely trained, except in Paris, and they follow legal procedures that are oblivious to gender issues. Yet, like in most places around the globe, the victims of sexual aggression are nearly always women and the risk of a false accusation remains insignificant compared to genuine cases.
“New York’s system is adapted to the volume of cases they have to treat and to the American legal system,” said Gilles Aubry, comptroller-general and a deputy-director of the PJ. He’s irritated by the comparison with American methods and worries that it will become “a controversial subject”.
"I'm not favourable to over-specialisation," he explained. "Listening is a primary moment, but there's more to it than that. Afterwards, you have to identify the perpetrator, and there, you use regular investigating techniques. We have good general knowledge. That seems a good thing to me," he said putting an end to references to the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair.
Along with robberies, fights, murders and drug trafficking cases, the Paris PJ, which includes the greater metropolitan area, handled 715 rape cases and 350 sexual aggressions in 2010. At the national level, 10,108 rapes were investigated last year and 7,376 of these were solved. This high level of resolution, 73 per cent, is explained by the fact that most of the perpetrators are close to the victims and relatively easy to find. Nonetheless, only a small minority of women file a complaint, especially when domestic violence is concerned, for fear of a criminal trial.
Although well-oiled, the procedure still resembles a maze. Each step constitutes an obstacle that must be overcome. The first difficulty comes with filing a complaint. When the victims decide to file a complaint, often after consulting a help-line, it is most often filed at the local police station or gendarmerie post, where they make a first deposition. Depending on the nature of the crime, they are guided towards the PJ if a felony, such as rape or attempted rape, has been committed or to the department charged with maintaining public order in the case of other types of sexual assault. The prosecutor's office controls the preliminary investigation.
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1: There are two nationwide police forces: the police nationale, active in urban areas and under the responsibility of the interior ministry, and the gendarmerie, a military force which polices mostly rural areas (recently also brought under the responsibility of the interior ministry). The PJ is a division of the police nationale. It has one large office in Paris and 20 regional offices and is allowed to operate outside of the jurisdiction to which it is attached. The Paris PJ, for example, can operate nationwide.
Interview can revive the trauma
"Here, at headquarters, as soon as we are made aware of the facts, we get our stand-by teams in gear. Day and night, we have personnel ready to take charge of the victims," explained Gilles Aubry. If the attack is recent, a priority is to take the person to the hospital, to the emergency forensics unit, to identify traces of blows, wounds, bite marks and other physical as well as mental injuries.
Samples are taken. Clothes and under-clothes are seized because they can provide evidence including saliva, blood, perspiration or sperm which may allow the perpetrator to be identified through the National Automated Genetic Database. "Of course, we have to make sure that the traces found belong to the aggressor because the victim can have encountered different people," Aubry explained.
Particularly trying, this examination is followed, a little later, by an in-depth interview by the police officers. It is aimed at corroborating the facts and obtaining the maximum amount of details about the events. "Of course there are some disturbed people who tell tales, but most often, that is not the case," stressed Gilles Aubry. "We start out with a positive approach. We don't try to question what they are saying, at least not at first. Even if the victim put herself in danger by, for example, drinking beyond a reasonable limit or taking up with people in a night club and leaving with them in the small hours, we will listen to her as attentively as to the woman who was followed home by a man who cornered her and raped her in her own apartment," he added.
"The people we see are very often traumatised," he added. "The first thing is to listen to them, to take the time to put them at ease. Because, after what they have been through, they sometimes have trouble expressing themselves. The most difficult for them is to put simple words on what happened to them," he said.
"You have to take care that the interview is not lived through as an additional traumatic experience and that's not always simple because the aggression has to be described in detail, if there was penetration with a finger or not, if the perpetrator undressed her, if he beat her, if he was in erection before and so on. By establishing a relationship based on trust and appeasement, we can gather more useful elements for the case," he added.
But the problem is that police officers, when they leave the accademy, are not trained to the specific problems linked to sexual aggression. Neither are the gendarmes, despite being the only ones to turn to in rural areas. At the PJ, to compensate for this problem, since 2003, the officers attend training sessions (one or two sessions per year for about 15 people). Since 2007, psychologists can be called in for interviews and a memo of best practice was drafted.
Aubry is in contact with the County ('département' in French) Commission Against Violence Against Women, which, since 1990, brings together associations defending victims' rights, magistrates, psychologists, police officers and local officials under the tutelage of the Paris prefect's office (the prefect is named by and represents the State at the département level). The training sessions and the rest are "particular to Paris," admits Gilles Aubry implying that lacking a national policy on the issue this type of training remains random.
Some women give up
There are other difficult moments as the investigation continues, such as the reconstitution at the scene of the crime; looking at a line-up of suspects and, eventually, the confrontation with the aggressor. Once the investigation is completed, the case is sent to the State prosecutor who decides whether or not to pursue it. The wait can be very long before an assistant prosecutor contacts the victim. Then, the same stages are repeated once again: meeting with the judge, reconstitution, and confrontation. When the verdict comes in, many years have gone by.
For Marie-Ange Le Boulaire, a journalist and film-maker who was the victim of a serial rapist in 1994, the procedure lasted over four years. Also the president of the National Association for the Recognition of Victims, she told her story in a book and in a film. She continues to impart her experience as a former victim to the officers of the PJ during training sessions. "Be careful, the PJ is not representative of the police or of the gendarmerie elsewhere. It's sort of a model. But even them, they don't see things in the same way after I've spoken with them for two or three hours," she stressed.
She provides different types of advice such as including the victim in the investigation. "During the attack, one is reduced to the status of a thing, you are passive. So if the person is made to feel active, trusting, she can add a lot," she said. The police should take the time to "really" listen. "She has to feel that she can take things at her own pace and that she won't be interrupted by a sandwich break or telephone calls," Le Boulaire added. The victim must be sufficiently reassured that she will put all her cards on the table, including illegal activities so that possible lies or grey areas don't turn against her later, she advises the officers. "Being a drug addict or a prostitute doesn't give anyone the right to rape you," she said.
Le Boulaire also teaches police officers to recognize frequent but little known symptoms exhibited by victims. "Rapes can also provoke a state of disassociation in which one looks at oneself from the outside. A few hours later, you can't remember everything. Sometimes even major elements come back later. Police officers must be aware of that and not find this phenomenon bizarre," she explained, stressing that for her, "the worse thing is to question the victim's word. The victim doesn't expect the police officer to cry on her shoulder. He must look at both sides of the case. But the victim, to hope that one day she will be able to move on, must be taken seriously and recognized as a victim".
Yet mistrust and suspicion are what many women live through when they enter a police station or gendarmerie post. A charter on how to greet victims has had some effect, but the lack of consideration can lead them to give up.
From a study of cases handled by the European Association Against Violence Against Women in the Workplace, researcher Catherine Le Magueresse has culled some of the responses women obtain when they first report a rape. These are contained in a report-in-progress entitled: Institutional Responses to Women Victims of Violence in the Workplace. These include: "This isn't the right police station." "Are you ready to put a man in jail?" "The facts aren't that serious." Or even: "If you were wearing jeans, you must have taken them off yourself".
In 2007, in the Hauts-de-Seine (département west of Paris), she noted that a police officer refused, although the facts were clear, to record a complaint for sexual harassment, claiming that "it's no big thing, so there's no point".
In a Parisian police station, a woman was nearly discouraged when the police officer asked her if she wasn't "named Monica Lewinsky too?". And there is the gendarme in the Vaucluse (département in southern France) who advised a woman to first go to the labour relations board (conseils des prud'hommes). "If that doesn't work, come back then," he suggested. Some women give up, like this one in 2003. "The police officers who listened to me took me to a specialised service. I found myself in front of two very cold officers before whom I didn't have the strength to tell the facts to yet again," she explained.
'Police learned alongside feminists'
Testimony of the same ilk, Marie-France Casalis, spokesperson for the Feminist Collective Against Rape which manages the SOS Women Rape Information help line, has her share as well. But she also targets the criminologists. Apart from the first contact with the police which is not always easy, she highlights some major malfunctions.
For one, the forensics exam: "These services, of which many are located next to the morgue, are so obsessed with their mission to serve the law that their cold, technical behaviour is hard to stand. Not to mention that the victim, lying down, is again reduced to the status of object and can have the impression of undergoing a second penetration," she said, giving some examples of unhelpful remarks such as "It's really too bad you washed" or "Why did you wait so long (after the rape) before coming?".
Then there is the take-over by the instructing magistrates, who are, according to Marie-France Casalis, "less advanced than the police officers" in combating sexual aggression. Her colleague Marie-Ange Le Boulaire agrees. "It's true that there is progress to be made in certain police stations where there can be a lot of people, which doesn't make taking the depositions easier. But hell begins with the judicial phase. With the police, you have a contact, you can call them. Afterwards, it's over. I waited, every day, for three-four months for the summons to arrive. It takes forever and there is no way of knowing where things are. Now, imagine if the guy hasn't been incarcerated. You're afraid of running into him in the street at any time," she said.
That's another limitation of the French system. The mechanisms to protect rape victims are insufficient. "That's the job of associations, to help them find a job, housing and to re-socialise [sic] somewhere far from their aggressors," Gilles Aubry tersely sums up. Also involved in the County Commission, Fatima Lalem, a deputy to Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë and responsible for gender equality issues, laments the lack of State financial commitment to housing structures destined for women who have suffered violent attack.
On the whole, the legal procedure is not geared to protecting women's rights. In the name of universal rights, standards are applied indifferently without taking into account the specific nature of crimes, which, nine times out of ten are directed against women.
As the experts Catherine Le Magueresse, Marie-France Casalis and Marie-Ange Le Boulaire recognise, progress has been made at the PJ because, as one of them says, "the police officers learned alongside the feminists". But elsewhere, officials are only sympathetic to victims if they have been exposed to sexual violence in their entourage. Improvements begin with basic training and greater specialisation of those involved in the process, according to these experts. Needless to say, they are closely watching what is happening in New York, both in the Special Victims Unit and in the Sex Crimes Unit of the prosecutor's office.
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English version: Pat Brett(Editing by Graham Tearse)