Tens of thousands of people across Europe on Saturday rallied against sexist violence, with more than 30,000 turning out in Paris.
Demonstrations across France drew about 50,000 people in all, according to organizer Caroline de Haas, to answer a citizen collective’s call for a “feminist tidal wave” of outrage against gender violence brought into sharp focus by the #MeToo movement.
One thousand people braved driving rain in Rome, while similar protests drew several hundred demonstrators in Geneva, Switzerland, and Athens on the eve of the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women yesterday.
Photo: AFP
In Madrid, several hundred people took to the streets to march to loud drumming as some shouted: “We are all here, the murderers are missing.”
Authorities put the Paris turnout at 12,000 and similar marches in Lyon, Marseille and Rennes at between 1,000 and 2,400, but De Haas felt moved to salute “the largest [feminist] mobilization France has known,” far bigger than a rally that drew about 2,000 last year.
French President Emmanuel Macron offered his support, tweeting: “The fight against violence against women is progressing daily, but our society has a long way to go: everyone must act and fight as this is everybody’s business.”
Participants clad in purple, the color of the #NousToutes women’s activist protest movement, shouted slogans, including “sick of rape,” “end impunity for aggressors” and “a woman is never responsible for the violence she suffers,” while also demanding sufficient government resources to tackle the issue.
“I am here to support all the victims and continue this struggle which started long before I came along,” said French actress Muriel Robin, who had organized a similar rally last month in the French capital.
The rallies drew a number of men, including Tanguy, a 19-year-old student who turned out in the western French city of Rennes to declare backing for “a movement which is not based on sex — it’s not a fight pitting men against women, but a fight by men and women, together, against inequality.”
The #NousToutes movement started out in France in September, inspired by the #MeToo campaign that began last year, since when the number of cases of sexual violence reported to police in France has risen 23 percent.
Latest French government figures show that last year saw 225,000 cases of domestic violence against women by their partners, while 2016 saw 123 deaths.
Further marches were planned for yesterday in a number of cities across Europe to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
Macron last year made sexual equality a priority of his presidency.
However, “if the money is not forthcoming, public policy won’t follow on,” De Haas said, speaking two days after several civil organizations called for a huge increase in public resources dedicated to the problem.
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe on Saturday announced that an online platform for reporting sexual violence and sexism would be launched tomorrow.
“This is the first milestone, technical and political, to eradicate” violence, said he said on Facebook.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver