Abstract

This article aims to delineate the underlying causality of gender violence, specifically the perseverance of rape as an institutional failure, in the particular spatio-temporality of France. The nonexistent levels of convictions for rape (0.6%), compared with the increase in reported rapes (a rape every 2.3 min, 1/2 women are survivors, 1/6 women entered sexuality through rape), forge a certain continuity with previous contexts in which rape was a crime against the honour of the family, rather than against the integrity of the victim. Rape is actively shaped by intersecting forms of violence. It is institutionalised because the authorities’ response is first to induce such a failure of justice. The ‘morphogenetic régulation’ approach endows my reflection with meta-theoretical depth to observe how one can explain such systemic persistence. The findings call for urgent academic and policy attention in re-examining the entire training procedures for judicial officers.