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Victims of sexual abuse slam police treatment in France
PARIS — One rape victim was asked by Paris police what she wore that day, and why she didn’t struggle more. Another woman was forced to demonstrate a sexual assault to an officer.
They are among thousands of French women who have denounced in a new online campaign the response of police officers victim-blaming them or mishandling their complaints as they reported sexual abuse.
Anna Toumazoff launched the hashtag #DoublePeine, or #DoubleSentencing, last month after she learned that a 19-year-old woman who filed a rape complaint in the southern city of Montpellier was asked by police in graphic terms whether she experienced pleasure during the assault.
The hashtag quickly went viral, with women describing similar experiences in Montpellier and other police stations across France.
French women’s rights group NousToutes counted at least 30,000 accounts of mistreatment in tweets, other social media messages and a website.
Addressing the national issue last week, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said “there are questions that cannot be asked to women when they come to file a complaint.”
Toumazoff denied launching an anti-police campaign, saying the hashtag aims at urging the government to take action.
“By letting incompetent and dangerous officers working in police stations, (authorities) expose the whole profession to shame,” she told The Associated Press.
The Montpellier regional branch of powerful police union Alliance argued that officers are just doing their jobs. “While police officers understand the victims’ distress, the establishment of the truth requires us to ask ‘embarrassing’ questions,” it said.
A 37-year-old Parisian woman told the AP about her experience at a police station after she was assaulted this year by a man living near her home, who had previously harassed her in the street.
The woman described arriving scared and crying at the police station, where officers welcomed her “very kindly.”
But then, she said, the officer in charge of filing the complaint did not write down her description of the assault, so she refused to sign the document.
“I had to tell it all again,” she said. The officer asked if she was certain that the abuser wanted to touch her breast.
“I had to make the gesture so that he sees that it was not another part of the body,” she said. “Making me repeat and ... mime the gesture in front of a wall, that’s humiliating.
The case is ongoing. Police suggested a change of apartment to move away from her abuser, she said. Another Parisian woman, 25, said she was left “traumatized” by the police treatment after she had been raped by her ex-boyfriend in 2016.
When she filed her initial complaint, the police officer, who had received special training, “explained to me why he was asking all these questions, he was in a spirit of kindness,” she remembers. “I felt rather safe and that he believed me.”
Months later she was summoned to another police station, located in the same street where her attacker was living. Feeling anxious at the idea of potentially seeing him, she said she was talked to as if she was “stupid” and “a liar.”
Police asked what she was wearing that day, why it was different from when she was having consensual sex with him, how she could argue she was surprised if he was wearing a condom, she said. An officer told her, “I don’t understand why you did not struggle more.”
The complaint was closed without follow-up due to lack of evidence. The woman described the police response as difficult to live through, with a “huge impact” on her private life.
The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they are victims of sexual assault.