Violence – Pike & Hurricane

“Féminicides”: the new French word to talk about the murder of women in France.

Aimée Niau Lacordaire — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 12:43:05 +0000

They were called Audrey, Chafia, Johanna, Monique, Mauricette. What do all these women have in common? They, and 116 others, were stabbed, burnt, strangled, slaughtered, beaten to death… by their spouse, husband or ex in the year 2019 in France.

The number of femicides in France since the beginning of the year 2019, is 121 as of 16/10/19, but the number grows every week. They were 121 in 2018, which means that we have exceeded the number of femicides compared to the previous year: evidence of a significant systemic problem.

A femicide is: “The murder of a woman or a young girl, because she is a woman.” It is, however, not recognized in the French penal code. In France, the expression officially entered the vocabulary of law and the humanities in 2014, but not in the penal code. According to lawyer Emmanuel Daoud, in the podcast “Pas son genre” on the radio France inter, the integration of “féminicide” in the penal code has lawyers divided. Indeed, for the murder of a woman and a man cannot be distinguished by name in the same way as the murder of a person according to their ethnicity.

There are several types of femicides but we will focus on the “intimate” femicide, committed by the victim’s current or former spouse. According to a study cited by the World Health Organization, more than 35% of women killed worldwide are killed by their partners, compared to only 5% of murders involving men.

WHY? Systemic violence, a patriarchal and sexist society!

A lot of association like Osons le féminisme ! speak about “systemic violence” (character of what is related to a system), and want “féminicide” to be recognized as a “societal fact” when many murders of women are still referred to as “crimes of passion” and relegated to the category of miscellaneous facts.

Systemic violence comes from a sexist and a patriarchal society. In our society women have “always” been considered inferior to men. Gender stereotypes reinforce the appearance of the weak, sweet, gentle woman and the strong men, manly, who think they are justified in abusing their spouse. In 1975, the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) released a video of men’s speeches about the violence they inflict on their spouses. We can hear sentences like: “If I want to hit my wife, I’m sure she will make love better” or, “There are women who like it, I don’t know, out of habit, maybe.” Even if it would be forbidden to have such public discourse, this reality is not so far from view of the number of femicides.

In many cases of femicide, there is domestic violence in the home. The patriarchal violence of judicial and police institutions ignore and diminish situations of violence reducing them to simple “marital disputes” whose violence is normalized. A lot of victims had told the police about the violence they were suffering, and now they are dead.

France is not the only country with a lot of femicide. 43600, this is the number of women and girls killed in 2012 worldwide. Countries such as Romania, Ireland, Finland, Germany and Mexico have the same systemic violence. For several months, thousands of Mexicans have been protesting, on social networks and in the streets, against the authority’s inaction in cases of femicide and sexual violence.

In Spain, since 2003, “machismo violence” has been erected as a great national cause. Faced with the resurgence of this violence in Spain, the socialist government of José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero wanted to strike hard, and put in place measures that today passed in the world. It’s novel in Europe, Spain have put in place a victim support offices, legal and psychological assistance and legal proceedings. Moreover, the government has unlocked an XXL budget to end femicides. The results are that in 2018, 47 women died at the hands of their spouse, compared to 71 in 2003.

So why does the French government not do the same?

Action in France and repression by the government!

Some actions by collectives, such as Noustoutes (“allofus”), Féminicide par son compagnon ou ex (“femicides by our spouse or ex”), or the Femen have been set up.

Féminicide par son compagnon ou ex use a Facebook page to register all the victims of the femicides in France. Noustoutes organized marches, demonstrations, to support, to inform, about the violence and the crimes that undergoes to the women. But nothing has changed in view of the number of femicides that are growing day by day.

A new form of protest has been put in place. Since August, feminist activists have posted them in the streets of Paris. They put up messages such as, “She leaves him, he kills her“, “More listened dead than alive“, or in commemoration of the victims: “Georgette was strangled by her husband the 21.03.19 “ as in the photo below. This movement has now settled in many cities of France.

“Georgette was strangled by her husband the 21.03.19”

Célia Maurincomme, feminist activist, who participates in the collage of signs in Lyon, said, “By putting up this sign against femicide, we want to inform people about those murders. And we expect a mobilization of citizens to put pressure on the French state! All this is illegal, we can be taken into custody for putting up posters.“

Many feminist activists have complained about police repression of collages or tags. As said by Célia Maurincomme, police can put you in jail if you put up collages or spray tags on walls about femicides. “One activist put up a sign that said ‘117 femicides, Macron reaction!’ outside of her window because Macron was coming to Lyon. Two armed policemen came to her house and confiscated the sign.” “Some girls were arrested by the police when they put up signs, the police humiliated them, and took their names, addresses, etc.” said C. Maurincomme.

A crackdown is put in place by the government, to punish women who are fighting against their own potential murder. “We’re being killed and you’re talking about tags on walls” said a feminist activist in Mexico.

Saturday 5 October 2019, hundred Femen, demonstrate at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. With their skin and hair grayed with clay, wearing messages written on their torso like “I didn’t want to die“, to denounce feminicide and to claim that the government needs “a stronger mobilization.”

Each had a black stele-shaped sign, with the names of women killed by their spouse or ex since the beginning of 2019. They wanted, with this strong act, to call out the “power in place‘,’ explained one of them in a statement. “We recall that most of these women, before being murdered, had been victims of domestic violence and had alerted civil society, police, justice, threats to them.”

by Aimée Niau Lacordaire

Photo credits

0001 by Alvaro Tapia CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Paris 2019, Ithmus, CC BY 2.0

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What’s that app doing?

Ryan Campbell — Sun, 07 Oct 2018 15:59:22 +0000

Fake news is prevalent in our society today and we find it on almost every platform, from social media, to television news, to presidential campaigns, and most of the time it seems harmless. But what if it is not? What if a text message you have received has the potential to be dangerous, or even lethal? What would you do with that message? How would you react? Would you kill?

The Trust Issue

When information originates from trusted sources such as a family member, a friend, or even government officials, it becomes hard to question its validity, as you trust its source. This is especially true when the information we receive validates our opinions, prejudices, or even the fears we may hold about a particular group within or aspect of our society. We seek to confirm our biases and it provides us comfort in knowing that we are not alone in what we are thinking about or noticing in our communities.

This trust, this satisfaction we find in the information we choose to consume, makes the dissemination of information, and even misinformation, an easy task across social media platforms, where an immense amount of information congregates. Fake news can often be harmless, such as a video showing a commercial airliner doing a barrel roll during a typhoon, or a shark which appears in almost every hurricane, to the more disturbing such as the allegation that a Washington D.C. based pizza restaurant was a front for a child sex ring ran by Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats. Fake news, however, can be a lot more dangerous, even deadly.

The Rumors

Over the past few months, mobs, driven by misinformation spread on the popular messaging service WhatsApp, have killed multiple people in states across the Republic of India. The communications in question targets the fears people of any community hold: suspicion of outsiders and that of having your children taken. The rumors spreading on WhatsApp alerted people to the fabricated threat of outsiders entering their area with the intention of abducting children, killing people, or even harvesting organs.

The popular messaging app, with over two-hundred million users just within India, allows for messages and video/audio clips to be shared without any indication as to its authenticity or origin. India is WhatsApp’s largest market and with the price of smartphones and internet data decreasing annually, that market is only going to expand. The rumors even spread from WhatsApp to local media stations where they took on a life of their own. This, alongside the ease and pace as to which information can be shared, and with the general lack of education about the dangers of sharing false information, contributes to the problem India finds themselves in today.

So What Happened?

In May, a family of five was driving in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to visit a temple; they were lost however, and asked for directions. This raised the suspicion of the locals, suspecting them of being child traffickers, and eventually the family were greeted by a mob who took them out of their car, stripped them naked, and beat them. Soon, sixty-five year old Rukmani was dead, the others close to it, and forty-six people were arrested.

This story is not unique. Nearly two-dozen people have been killed, and many more injured in this manner across India over the past few months, and these killings are not just limited to villages, attacks have even happened in major tech hubs and cities, such as one example in India’s third largest city Bangalore.

Some of the messages attributed to the killings were videos, one of which appeared to show a man on a scooter kidnapping a child. From the outside, the video appears to be exactly what the rumors have been describing: a man abducting a child in a public street. However, this video originates from a Pakistani public service announcement about the dangers of child abduction. The video ends with a message stating that in Karachi, Pakistan, three-thousand children go missing annually and urges parents to be vigilant to ensure the safety of their children.

The version found on WhatsApp however, was edited to remove the concluding message and leaving only the video of the mock kidnapping. Without the clarifying message at the end it is easy to mistake the depicted event as an actual kidnapping and when the video is shared with a message indicating that this is happening nearby it can be persuasive. The messages and clips that are received, may or may not reflect reality, and with no safeguards within the app to determine the credibility of information received, not much can be done to determine the authenticity of the message.

What Can be Done?

Discovering the origin of these false and potentially dangerous messages is no simple task. The end-to-end encryption that WhatsApp was built on makes it difficult for authorities to determine where these messages originate. If authorities join WhatsApp groups, such as was the case in Balaghat, a district in the state of Madhya Pradesh, they may be able to determine who broadcasts such messages and make arrests. But often, this is not the norm.

In an attempt to counteract the spread of dangerous misinformation, WhatsApp have taken a number of steps aimed at educating the public and limiting the spread of false information. Two blog posts from July, posted on WhatsApp’s website, indicate two tools that the company has implemented to help curb this issue: limitations on forwarded messages and indicators on forwarded messages stating that the messages you received were indeed forwarded. This is done to urge users to consider the validity of the message before sharing it with others. WhatsApp also removed the “quick-forward” button that would appear next to messages containing any form of media. This is expected to help curb the spread of fake news as users in India forward more messages than users in any other country.

Authorities in India are doing their best to educate the public about how to discern what is false from what is true. Police have been taking to the streets, handing out flyers, holding town meetings, and even speaking to students, all in an effort to urge the public to be skeptical of what they may come across online. WhatsApp themselves recently have taken out informational ads in leading Indian newspapers both in Hindi and English. In some areas, the Indian government even shut down the internet at times in attempts to quell the flow of misinformation and WhatsApp even offered a $50,000 USD reward to anyone who can come up with a solution for this problem.

However, these are all just temporary fixes to a larger problem. While many things can be done to improve the app, it is not fair to place all the blame for these events on WhatsApp, for on the other side of these messages are real people who decide to create and distribute this information. This points to a larger societal problem that cannot be changed by some alterations to the app’s policies or code. Change needs to occur which dissuades people from wanting to produce misinformation in the first place, before it is spread. If those people are reached, then WhatsApp, Indian officials, and the general public have a chance at preventing its spread. In the meantime, think before you share a post.

By Ryan Campbell

Photo Credits

WhatsApp, Senado Federal (CC BY 2.0)

Angry Mob, Dalibor Levíček (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Screenshot WhatsApp, Ryan Campbell

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