Summary

In France, acts of violence against women are not generally the object of public services’ specific attention and security policies are gender-neutral and ignore the element of gender (ex., police statistics are not categorized according to the sex of the victim). While municipal authorities have come to include more women, public policies remain neutral, conforming to the republican tradition which tends to be suspicious of particularities. Here, Paris is the exception since the March 2001 election of a socialist Mayor who has been attempting to consider issues of violence against women in municipal policy, such as by proposing the implementation of safety walks.

As a result, safety walks were conducted in two city districts: one was a relatively calm and middle-class district whose surrounding neighbourhoods were considered problematic, the other was a working-class district that was evolving due to an increase in its middle-class population. In both cases, the safety walks were organized by elected municipal officials however they were only marginally recognized as they were not made well-known. Furthermore, follow-up on these walks has only been more or less satisfactory as the instigating elected officials undertook the walks in a rather competitive manner and therefore exchanged little information amongst themselves.

In the first district, the institutionalization of safety walks has been to the detriment of women’s central role in the action. Women remain at the centre of activity in the second district, however the municipality does not take their safety walks into consideration. Nevertheless, the walks do create the opportunity for some women to claim public space.