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The judicial treatment of sexual and domestic violence in France. Maëlle Stricot. April 2024. Note IPP n°107.
Presentation
Despite the collective awareness raised by the #MeToo wave in October 2017, violence against women remains frequent. In a context of greater free speech and increased mobilization of public authorities, cases of sexual and domestic violence brought to the attention of the justice system have never been so numerous. However, the response given by the judiciary to such violence has been subject to many criticisms. This note seeks to provide new insights on the judicial treatment of violence against women and its evolution over time.
Key results
- As with most criminal offenses, the rate of dismissal is high, affecting 86% of cases of sexual
violence and 72% of cases of domestic violence. For other offenses involving crimes
against persons, this figure stands at 85 %. - While criminal offenses are predominantly dismissed because the perpetrator is unknown,
cases of sexual and domestic violence are mainly marked as “insufficiently characterized”
by the public prosecutor’s office and dismissed due to a lack of evidence. - However, perpetrators who are prosecuted are often convicted, with harsher sentences
imposed for sexual violence than for other crimes against persons. - The number of sexual and domestic violence cases handled by the justice system has risen sharply since 2017.
- While the proportion of domestic violence cases dismissed decreased from 73% in 2012
to 67% in 2020, the opposite trend is observed for sexual violence cases. During the
same period, the proportion of rape cases dismissed increased from 82% to 94 %. - The increase in prosecutions of domestic violence perpetrators came along with greater
sentence severity.
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Method and data
The data used for this study comes from the CASSIOPÉE management software. This software is used by the courts to process all offenses relating to fifth-class contraventions, misdemeanors and felonies, committed by individuals (adults and minors) or corporate entities, and the information is mainly entered by the court registries. The data extracted from the CASSIOPÉE statistical file by the Ministry of Justice provides information on all criminal cases received by magistrates, dismissed or terminated at first instance in the correctional court or juvenile court between 2012 and 2021. This note is one of the first research studies to make use of these data, in particular to exploit their longitudinal dimension. As the data are only available for completed cases and not for those still in the process of being judged, they must be interpreted with caution for the last two years in terms of time series. Furthermore, the data available do not cover cases that have been dismissed following investigation, or cases tried in assize courts or departmental criminal courts – which nonetheless correspond to a small proportion of cases handled by the criminal justice system in general (Ministry of Justice, 2019).
Author
Maëlle Stricot is a doctoral student at the Paris School of Economics and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, affiliated with the Institut des politiques publiques (IPP) and the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA).
Partner
This work has benefited from state aid managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under the PgSE Investissements d’avenir program (reference ANR-17-EURE-0001) and from ANR SOCOCITY (reference ANR-18-CE22-0013) for funding the Secure Data Access Center (CASD).
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