Electronic tag to be used in cases of domestic violence in France

A French governmental panel on domestic violence is urging authorities to use an electronic tag on offenders to prevent them from approaching their victims.

This proposal was one of the 65 recommendations made to Marlène Schiappa, the French equality secretary, at the panel in Paris today.

This panel was launched by the French Prime Minister, Édouard Philippe, on 3 September 2019, a date that refers to the helpline 3919 for victims of domestic violence.

The use of the electronic tag on perpetrators was already experimented in 2010, when a law on domestic violence was passed.

It had caused a great controversy since it is a physical restraint, and therefore, was considered unconstitutional by the Constitutional Council.

Some proposals such as confiscating guns from suspects, improving the reception of victims in police stations, legislating and codifying all types of violence and making medical confidentiality evolve were also at the centre of the debate.

Valérie Boyer, a member of the National Assembly, said: “The improvement of the protection order and the generalisation of the electronic tag are important things, the requisition of firearms is the bare minimum, however, I regret that economic violence is still not included in the law.”

The 2010 law had introduced the protection orders and had included psychological violence along physical violence.

For Pauline Georget, an activist from Collages Féminicides Paris: “These measures are going in the right direction, for most of them, but no budget was specified, which leaves us to truly think that these measures will not really be applied or correctly financed.

“Moreover, some measures are quite simply worrying, for instance, the suppression of parental authority in the case of a femicide: we cannot wait for the murder of a woman to remove the father’s authority, especially knowing that a femicide is often followed by an infanticide.”

Boyer said that the government should “create a status of child-victim” because “children are the first victims of domestic violence and are usually manipulated.

“We cannot dissociate the protection of women from the one of their family and children. The child is often subject to coercion and violence, and 80% of abused women are also mothers,” she declared.

Boyer also added that: “the exercise of parental authority has become a means of control on the woman and the child.

“This is a particularly alarming observation and it is alarming for women who are directly victims of domestic violence because we have reached the stage of 125 women today, so this is, unfortunately, a record year.”

In 2018, 121 women in France were killed at the hands of their partner or ex- partner, equating to a death every three days, according to a press release from the Ministry of the Interior.

This year, a femicide is committed every two days, according to NousToutes.org, a French NGO fighting sexist and sexual violence against women.

To fight the ever-growing number of femicides, organisations like Collages Féminicides have taken actions: “We glue denunciatory messages everywhere in France to let every woman who has endured these situations, know that we support them and that they are not alone.”

On 23 November, a march will take place in Paris to put an end to domestic violence and to pay tribute to the victims.