Paris:

France announced Monday a new campaign to combat violence against women, including raising awareness about the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse, as the country reckons with a mass rape trial that has shocked the public.

Equality Minister Salima Saa unveiled a raft of initiatives two days after tens of thousands of people demonstrated in major French cities against violence targeting women, where protestors denounced government actions as “window-dressing”.

A case in the southern city of Avignon for 51 men, including one who drugged his wife over a decade and dozens of others are charged with accepting his invitations to abuse her at their home in Mazan in southern France, has stoked widespread anger.

There will be “a before Mazan, and an after Mazan just like there was a before and after #MeToo,” Saa said during an interview with broadcaster Franceinfo.

But advocates are calling for more far-reaching measures, including a dedicated 2.6 billion euro ($2.7 billion) budget and a stronger legal framework to tackle the problem.

The government will extend the network of hospitals where victims can report an incident from 236 to 377 by the end of 2025, Saa said, marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

“A woman will be able to lodge a complaint at all hospitals with an emergency department and a gynaecological service,” she said.

Focus on drugs

She also announced an awareness campaign about the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse, which she called “a new scourge”.

As part of the campaign, a helpline “can provide answers and advice and tell you which laboratory to go to, what to do with your hair, blood tests, and urine tests”, Saa said.

The budget for emergency assistance to help victims of domestic violence leave their homes will increase from 13 million euros to 20 million in 2025, a measure that has benefited 33,000 people since it was introduced at the end of 2023.

“We have succeeded in obtaining a 10 percent increase in the budget” devoted to gender equality, totalling 85.1 million euros, Saa said.

But that number falls far short of demands coming from women’s rights associations, which are calling for 2.6 billion euros and a “comprehensive legal framework” to replace current legislation that advocates say is “fragmented and incomplete”.

During his first term as president, Emmanuel Macron vowed to work to eliminate violence against women, a message Saa reiterated, calling it the “great cause” of his presidency.

In 2023, police recorded more than 110,000 victims of sexual violence — 85 percent of them women.

And since the start of this year, 122 women have been killed, according to the feminist group NousToutes (All of us Women).

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A French retiree goes on trial Monday accused of recruiting dozens of strangers online to rape his wife after he drugged her into unconsciouness, in a case that has horrified the country.

Fifty other men are also on trial in the southern city of Avignon alongside the main suspect, a 71-year-old former employee at France’s power utility EDF.

They are accused of raping the woman who, her lawyers say, was so heavily sedated that she was not aware of the abuse.

The trial will be “a horrible ordeal” for the woman, now in her 70s, and who does not wish to be identified, said Antoine Camus, one of her lawyers.

“For the first time, long after the fact, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,” he told AFP, adding that his client had “no recollection” of the abuses which she only discovered in 2020.

The woman could have asked for the trial to be held behind closed doors but didn’t, because “that’s what her attackers would have wanted”, Camus said.

“She is completely determined to face them and her husband with whom she lived for 50 years but whom she knew nothing about, as she discovered at 68,” the lawyer said.

Police began to investigate the defendant Dominique P. in September 2020 when he was caught by a security guard secretly filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping centre.

Examining his computer, police said they found thousands of pictures and videos of his wife, visibly unconscious and mostly in the fetal position.

The images are alleged to show dozens of instances of rape in the couple’s home in Mazan, a village of barely 6,000 inhabitants some 33 kilometres (21 miles) from Avignon in Provence.

Up to six times

Investigators also found chats on a site called coco.fr, since shut down by police, in which he recruited strangers to come to their home and have intercourse with his wife.

Police counted a total of 92 rapes, committed by 72 men of whom 51 were formally identified.

Dominique P. admitted to investigators that he gave his wife powerful tranquilisers, especially Temesta, an anxiety-reducing drug.

The abuse started in 2011, when the couple was living near Paris, and continued after they moved to Mazan two years later.

The suspect gave the men strict instructions so they would not wake her up when they abused her during the night.

No aftershave or cigarette odour were allowed, and they had to warm their hands before touching her, and get undressed in the kitchen so they would not accidentally leave clothes behind in the bedroom.

The husband took part in the rapes, filmed them and encouraged the other men using degrading language, according to prosecutors.

No money exchanged hands.

The accused rapists, aged between 21 and 68, included a forklift driver, a fire brigade officer, a company boss, and a journalist.

Some were single, others married or divorced, and some family men. Most participated just once, some up to six times.

‘Closer to coma’ 

Their defence has been that they simply helped a libertine couple live out its sexual fantasies, but Dominique P. told investigators that they were all aware that his wife had been drugged without her knowledge.

The trial will have to establish to what degree they understood the situation when they had intercourse with the woman whose state, an expert said, “was closer to a coma than to sleep”.

Her husband told prosecutors that only three men left the house quickly after arriving, while all others proceeded to have intercourse with his wife.

Dominique P., who said he himself was raped by a male nurse when he was nine, is ready to face “his family and his wife”, his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro told AFP.

This trial may not be his last. He has also been charged with a 1991 murder and rape, which he denies, and an attempted rape in 1999, to which he admitted after conclusive DNA testing.

“There is no such thing as a typical rapist profile,” Veronique Le Goaziou, a specialist on sexual violence, told AFP.

“Many people will say he is crazy,” she said about Dominque P. “But that’s in no way certain. Only a tiny number of rapists are diagnosed with a real mental illness.”

Psychiatric evaluations during the investigation have shown Dominique P. to be “a patriarch” and “a manipulator” with a “perverse” personality who used his wife as “bait”.

The trial is set to run to December.
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)