Femicide in France: Why does the country lag behind on gender violence measures?

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00:00 Joining us on the program is Annette Young, the host of the 51% France 24's

00:04 women's show that is returning on Friday after a summer break. Annette, just give

00:09 us a sense of context here because huge numbers in terms of femicide here in

00:13 France but it's actually neighboring Spain which has become sort of the

00:17 leader as it were in terms of how you deal with this. Indeed and it all goes

00:22 back Gavin to the Zapatero socialist government back in 2004, that's nearly

00:26 20 years ago now, where they were ahead of the bell curve if you like and

00:31 introduced these extraordinary laws about dealing with gender violence to

00:35 the point that France is now looking towards Spain as a you know a role

00:40 model. For instance they set up a separate court dealing with gender

00:44 violence cases and this is really important because what it does is

00:47 immediately change the dynamic as such by emphasizing the victims rights. For

00:53 instance the victim and the perpetrator were never together or never together

00:56 in the same room. It also helps to fast-track various cases because the

01:01 problem here in France is a lot of these gender violence court cases take a long

01:06 time to be processed because they caught up within the bulk of the you know the

01:10 normal court system as such. But also like France sadly Spain has seen a

01:16 notable spike in femicides this year but as a result its current socialist-led

01:22 government is studying proposals that would permit authorities to inform women

01:28 who are victims of domestic violence of their partners previous convictions. In

01:32 other words alerting women to the fact that you know the person they're

01:37 involved with has either been in court or face penalties as such. It's also

01:42 called on courts and prosecutors to step up the use of electronic bracelets to

01:47 help protect women whose former partners are object to restraining orders and of

01:52 course as we know femicides are more than ever carried out by either partners

01:57 or ex-partners. But to give you some context as to why Spain is leading the

02:01 way and to the point that it is now one of the top 15 countries in terms of its

02:07 gender rights policies we headed there a couple of years ago because we want to

02:13 know why. How is it in less than 50 years a country went from being under a decades

02:20 of fascist dictatorship and also a very traditional Catholic country to now being

02:24 seen as a global leader and a lot of it has to do when we spoke to women there

02:29 was that the feminist movement saw this as an opportunity during the 1970s to

02:35 move very quickly and to get governments and local authorities to address

02:41 feminism as part of policymaking.

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