Provoke a “change of culture”: this is the aim of a guide published this Friday by the Ministry of the Public Service, which aims to raise public employers’ awareness of gender-based and sexual violence and to better collect reports from victims.
The room for improvement is immense: since 2018, barely a hundred sanctions (from a simple warning to dismissal) are pronounced each year against state civil servants for gender-based and sexual violence.
Women represent nearly six agents out of ten in the State civil service, which employs approximately 2.5 million people. “There is a real appropriation of the (reporting) systems to be carried out”, we recognize within the administration, which promises “zero tolerance” for gender-based and sexual violence.
“There is a change of culture to accompany”
Since a law of 2019, public employers are obliged to provide a reporting system for moral harassment, discrimination and sexist and sexual violence. But so far, “the communication on the reporting devices was perhaps not sufficiently exploited and therefore there was a lack of knowledge”, argues the ministry. The low number of reports and sanctions also shows “the difficulty of testifying to these facts in a professional context”.
Hence the idea of this guide published on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and sent to employers in the three parts of the public service (State, territorial, hospital).
This manual is structured in two parts: the first seeks to define precisely what gender-based and sexual violence is, the second to prevent and punish it, in addition to supporting the presumed victims and the people involved. “There is a change in culture to support, it is one of our priorities for 2023”, says the Ministry of the Public Service. An assessment of the national network of sexist and sexual violence referents, and of its territorial network, must in particular be drawn up.