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 a gainst women? RÉSUMÉ: En 2014, la France a ratifié la Convention du Conseil de l’Europe sur la prévention et la lutte contre la violence à l’égard des femmes et la violence domestique (dite Convention d’Istanbul) et a adopté dans la foulée la loi pour l’égalité réelle entre les femmes et les hommes afin de mettre en conformité la législation française. Cette loi place la lutte contre la violence à l’égard des femmes dans un contexte de lutte contre les inégalités de genre. Si cela est loin d’être une nouveauté à l’échelle internationale, cela l’est en France. Lorsque les conceptions structurelles et transformatrices de la violence à l’égard des femmes présentes dans les textes internationaux sont traduites à l’échelle nationale en lois, documents d’orientation et mesures de mise en œuvre sur le terrain, elles peuvent alors remettre en question des idées largement répandues sur les rapports de genre, ou au contraire être édulcorées afin d’aboutir à un consensus. Dans quelle mesure la politique de la France relative à la violence à l’égard des femmes s’est-elle alignée sur les initiatives de l’ONU et du Conseil de l’Europe qui présentent ce type de violence comme étant à la fois une cause et une conséquence des rapports de force liés au genre? Le genre et la violence fondée sur le genre, qui sont des concepts internationalement reconnus, ont-ils été intégrés dans les débats politiques français, et si oui, de quelle manière? Quelles en sont les implications le cas échéant sur la poursuite, en France et ailleurs, de la lutte pour éliminer la violence à l’égard des femmes

Creep-fatigue-oxidation interactions in a 9Cr-1Mo martensitic steel, part III. Lifetime prediction

International audienceA model devoted to the prediction of the high temperature creep–fatigue lifetime of modified 9Cr–1Mo martensitic steels is proposed. This model is built on the basis of the physical mechanisms responsible for damage due to the interaction of creep, fatigue and oxidation. These mechanisms were identified thanks to detailed observations previously reported in part I and part II of this study. These observations led to the distinction of two main domains, corresponding to two distinct types of interaction between creep, fatigue and oxidation. As no intergranular creep damage can be observed in the tested loading range, the proposed modelling consists in the prediction of the number of cycles necessary for the initiation and the propagation of transgranular fatigue cracks. Propagation rate measurements under high stress low-cycle fatigue conditions were carried out to calibrate the Tomkins model used to predict the life spent in crack propagation, whereas the initiation stage is predicted using the model proposed by Tanaka and Mura. The predictions obtained compare very favorably with the experimental creep–fatigue lifetimes. Finally the extrapolations and limits of the model are discussed

A test for assessment of saproxylic beetle biodiversity using subsets of monitoring species

In European forests, large scale biodiversity monitoring networks need to be implemented - networks which include components such as taxonomical groups that are at risk and that depend directly on forest stand structure. In this context, monitoring the species-rich group of saproxylic beetles is challenging. In the absence of sufficient resources to comprehensively survey a particular group, surrogates of species richness can be meaningful tools in biodiversity evaluations. In search of restricted subsets of species to use as surrogates of saproxylic beetle richness, we led a case study in Western Europe. Beetle data were compiled from 67 biodiversity surveys and ecological studies carried out from 1999 to 2010 with standardized trapping methods in France and Belgium. This large-scale dataset contains 642 forest plots, 1521 traps and 856 species. Twenty-two simplified species subsets were identified as potential surrogates, as well as the number of genera, a higher taxonomic level, taking into account, for each surrogate, the effort required for species identification, the practical monitoring experience necessary, the species conservation potential or the frequency of species occurrence. The performance of each surrogate was analyzed based on the following parameters: overall surrogacy (correlation between subset richness and total species richness), surrogacy vs. identification cost balance, surrogacy variation over a wide range of ecological conditions (forest type, altitude, latitude and bio-geographical area) and consistency with spatial scale. Ecological representativeness and ability to monitor rare species were supplementary criteria used to assess surrogate performance. The subsets consisting of the identifiable (or only easy-to-identify species) could easily be applied in practice and appear to be the best performing subsets, from a global point of view. The number of genera showed good prediction at the trap level and its surrogacy did not vary across wide environmental gradients. However, the subset of easy-to-identify species and the genus number were highly sensitive to spatial scale, which limits their use in large-scale studies. The number of rare species or the species richness of single beetle families (even the best single-family subset, the Cerambycidae) were very weak surrogates for total species richness. Conversely, the German list of monitoring species had high surrogacy, low identification costs and was not strongly influenced by the main geographical parameters, even with our French and Belgian data. In European-wide monitoring networks, such internationally validated subsets could be very useful with regard to the timing and cost-efficiency of field inventories