“Today in France, one still dies of being a woman”. Thirty mayors of large cities, including Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Nantes, and presidents of departments signed a manifesto on Friday calling for the fight “against the systemic nature” of gender-based violence and “protecting women victims”. “Each year, on average, nearly 100,000 women are victims of rape or attempted rape, 12% of them who have filed a complaint only, and 1% of the perpetrators who are convicted. So faced with this reality, as appalling as it is unacceptable, mayors, department heads are acting, ”explained Johanna Rolland, the PS mayor of Nantes.
The signing of this manifesto took place within the framework of the first national meetings to combat gender-based violence, whose slogan is “open our voices” and which attracted some 2,500 participants in Nantes on Friday and Saturday.
That “professionals in contact with children” be trained
By signing the manifesto, elected officials undertake to act through concrete actions such as the designation of an elected official “delegate to the fight against gender-based violence”, the implementation for local authority agents of “training in the prevention and the fight against sexist and intra-family violence”, or even the fact of “guaranteeing access to emergency and transitional accommodation for women victims”. The manifesto also aims to demand from the State that “professionals in contact with children” be trained “in the fight against gender stereotypes, the promotion of equality, the identification of situations of violence”.
One of the main demands of the manifesto is to demand from the State “an annual budget of one billion euros” to finance in particular “the creation of emergency accommodation places and temporary accommodation for women victims”. “All the actresses, all the actors agree on this point: it is urgent that the State finally meet this demand”, insisted Johanna Rolland, who was accompanied to present the manifesto of the PS mayor of Nancy , Mathieu Klein and the PS president of the Seine-Saint-Denis departmental council, Stéphane Troussel. Among the 26 signatures of the manifesto, we find the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, the mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan, or the mayor of Toulouse, Jean-Luc Moudenc and the mayor of Reims, Arnaud Robinet.