Gender-based violence against women in contemporary France: domestic violence and forced marriage policy since the Istanbul Convention

Abstract

In 2014, France ratified the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention) and passed the Law for Equality between Women and Men to bring French law into line with it. The Law for Equality between Women and Men situates the fight against violence against women within a broader context of the need to address inequalities between women and men. This is not new at the international level, but it is new to France. When the structural, transformative understandings of violence against women found in international texts are translated into national laws, policy documents and implementation on the ground, they might challenge widespread ideas about gender relations, or they might be diluted in order to achieve consensus. To what extent has French violence against women policy moved into line with UN and Council of Europe initiatives which present violence against women as both a cause and a consequence of gendered power relations? Have internationally accepted concepts of gender and gender-based violence been incorporated into French policy debates and, if so, how? What implications, if any, does all this have for the continued struggle in France and elsewhere to eliminate violence against women?