Days after the Swedish government released crime statistics from last year which showed the number of rape incidents to have climbed by 25% from those recorded in 2017, the French interior ministry released figures that are even more shocking, revealing that instances of sexual violence in 2021 increased by 33% from the previous year.
The crime figures, released on Thursday by the Ministerial Internal Security Statistical Department (SSMSI), not only revealed that instances of sexual violence—rape, attempted rape, sexual harassment, and sexual assault—jumped 33% from the previous year, but that physical assaults rose for the third year in a row, the Paris-based newspaper Le Figaro reports.
With regard to the number of people, aged 15 and over, who reported being victims of intentional assault or battery in 2021, that number climbed by 12% from 2020, which subsequently saw a 1% jump from 2019—a year that witnessed an 8% increase from the year preceding it.
Within the same category, victims of domestic violence increased by 14%, while victims of other intentional blows and injuries grew by 9%.
Additionally, while police and gendarmes recorded 75,800 complaints from victims of sexual violence, a third more than were registered the previous year, the number of rape and attempted rape victims jumped 32%—nearly the same rate (33%) as the number of people who fell victim to sexual harassment or other forms of sexual assault.
Interestingly, France’s interior ministry attempted to blame the sharp rise in sexual violence on the so-called MeToo Movement. In a press release, interior minister Gérald Darmanin wrote: “These trends are part of the context of freedom of speech and better consideration of this subject by the police, a priority of the Government since the beginning of the five-year term.”
Since the beginning of President Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term in 2017, the number of declared victims of sexual violence and intrafamily violence had risen a jaw-dropping 82% and 57%, respectively.
The interior minister also noted that the number of homicides had risen by 4.3% in 2021—a similar rate to that which has been observed for the last several years. Furthermore, he indicated that although the number of property crimes dropped, the number of scams increased sharply increase precipitously, at 30%.
Concerning the use and trafficking of narcotics, the number of individuals charged with selling drugs increased by 13%, while the number of people charged with using drugs jumped by 38%.
The release of last year’s crime figures comes a month after the interior ministry published crime statistics from 2020 which revealed that non-French migrants were accused of carrying out 62% of the acts of sexual violence on public transportation systems in the Paris region.
