Some additional statistics
Among the more than 94.000 rapes or rape attempts committed each year in France, only 13% result in the filing of a complaint, and only 2% end up in a conviction in a criminal court. With a massive “reclassification” of rape cases, which end up in correctional court instead of being, as they should be, judged in criminal court; when it is not the statue of limitations that strikes.
Of the 20% of working women who have experienced sexual harassment in their professional life: in 69% of cases, the employer is not made aware of the sexual harassment, and for the victims who dare to take the step, in 40% of cases it ends up to their detriment.
Three out of ten employees feel that they have already been subjected to moral harassment in the workplace.
The figures for other types of violence are not reassuring either.
14% of French people have been victims of abuse (physical, sexual or psychological) by an adult during their childhood. 60% of them have not told anyone about it.
Finally, let's look at what happened with #metoo and other phenomena of great public unpacking. These mass testimonies, which liberate speech, but can also become lynchings without evidence or trial, long years after the facts, are symptoms of a society in which large populations of victims have never been able to obtain justice.
Some judicial reflections
Since the trial by ordeal, since the preparatory question and the definitive question, since the testimony under oath as the main source of proof, Justice has come a long way.
Ballistics, forensic autopsy, graphological or psychological analysis, fingerprints and DNA, exploitation of various recordings, have made it possible to remove a good part of the "human factor" in the establishment of facts. But important gaps remain.
Why do individuals often not file a complaint in case of assault, lie, moral or sexual harassment, or hazing? Because they know that in addition to the slowness of the legal system, they will have to face suspicions of affabulation, to play their word against that of the offender (who has - and it is fortunate - the presumption of innocence), and to risk the shipwreck in the event of insufficiency of proof.
Even the goodwill legal initiatives to penalize street harassment are insufficient because there is not a police officer at every street intersection.
How many injustices would be avoided if the courts did not rely so much on the analyses of laboratory technicians who, for some, completely falsify the results?
Even without dishonesty on the part of the technical staff, how many children have been taken away from innocent parents, or on the contrary left in the hands of torturers, on the basis of deficient analyses or clever lies? For children in the care of the child welfare system, the situation sometimes seems just as cruel.
Do we think that DNA analysis or fingerprints are very conclusive? They are not, and nothing is easier than cunningly laying out the tracks of an innocent person at a crime scene, or tying bags of drugs under the car of a political opponent.
How can we differentiate between "traumatic amnesia" and "induced memory", when therapists can so easily become gurus, and turn individuals against their loved ones? The obsession with alternative therapies, more and more audacious in their pseudo-scientific claims (psychoanalytical numerology, transgenerational analysis...) creates a fertile ground for distortions of reality.
Without forgetting, as the Outreau trial terribly demonstrated it, that in the testimonies of traumatized victims, the true and the false can become inseparable.
And let's not even talk about false testimonies born of resentment, blackmail, corruption, sexual acts not assumed, psychological disorders...