French police rape verdict comes as sexual violence complaints rise

On the day elite policemen in Paris were convicted of raping a Canadian tourist – a verdict activists hail as a watershed – an official French report noted a jump in sexual violence complaints for 2018 with a nod to the Weinstein scandal and #MeToo.

The coincidence of the two pieces of good news for women’s rights proponents and victims’ rights advocates in France is, to be clear, fortuitous. The Interior Ministry’s crime statistics are released annually. The guilty verdict in the Emily Spanton case was five years’ in the making, stretching back to the night in April 2014 when the then 34-year-old was gang-raped inside Paris’s prestigious judicial police headquarters by officers she met at a nearby pub.

But to hear one victims’ rights advocate tell it, they are instructive — two sides of the same coin in a country where attitudes towards sexual violence victims and the victims’ own attitudes towards seeking justice are both changing with the times.

via France24