The Violence of the Judicial System Against Women Victims of Gender-Based and Sexual Violence (in France)

The Silent Violence of Justice: Thamila’s Story

Whether a victim is dead or alive, there is no relief and no true justice for the majority of women subjected to gender-based and sexual violence  even after filing a complaint.

Thamila is a young woman in whom many of us can see ourselves. In the short film “Sans Suite”, she finds herself in a shelter for victims of gender-based and sexual violence. Alongside other young women, she tries to rebuild what one might call a normal life through simple, light-hearted moments shared among girls: shopping trips, nights out, evenings in the center filled with laughter and a sense of breathing again.

Because we must never forget: they are women before all else. Women who love to laugh, to have fun, to enjoy their youth without constantly thinking about the harshness and cruelty of the world they’ve encountered. These precious moments allow them to reconnect with a part of themselves that the violence tried to tear away.

These moments of sisterhood forge deep, almost inseparable bonds. A space without judgment, where each can finally be fully herself. They rediscover themselves in each other, but also for themselves, focusing on physical and emotional wellbeing. They take care of themselves, reclaiming bodies and identities that had been denied or made invisible by their attackers identities they weren’t even sure still had meaning.

These women seek justice. But what they truly long for is something deeper: to reclaim what their aggressors methodically tried to steal their life as women. Justice is supposed to be a process of reparation. A means for society to publicly recognize that these women have the right to exist fully, to say no, to be protected. A process where consent or its absence  is acknowledged, heard, and condemned.

But how can these women truly walk that path when the only concrete power offered to them leads nowhere to just another entry in the statistics? A procedure often cold, impersonal, applying the law rigidly, without humanity.

Before even reaching justice, these women must face numerous agents of public authority. They’re forced to recount the facts again and again to people whose names they barely know. They must expose the deepest terror of their intimacy as if describing a bicycle ride. Yet each word carries a memory so stubborn that it becomes a brick of trauma. Each sentence is pain, humiliation, dissociation.

This lack of recognition the refusal to listen, to believe, to understand  is like taking a second bullet to the heart. As if the first weren’t enough. As if to make sure the soul truly leaves the body, and that the identity  already so battered disappears as well.The dismissal of Thamila’s case had that effect: a second bullet to the heart, to ensure her light was truly extinguished.

And so, Thamila, robbed of her last breath of hope, chooses what she believes to be the only way out: she stops fighting for her soul to survive. She lets it go. She throws herself out the window of her room, no longer seeing her existence as something to rebuild, but as a countdown triggered by that second bullet  the legal case dismissed without further action.

Thamila, like so many other women in that shelter, endured violence that any of us could face. And the problem remains the same: escaping one form of violence does not mean being free from it. Worse, experiencing one kind of violence doesn’t prevent you from enduring others  sometimes simultaneously, sometimes one after another.

Thamila suffered sexual violence, but also another kind quieter, institutional, often ignored: the violence of the justice system. A cold violence that dissects trauma not to heal it, but to expose it. A violence that lays bare without ever offering care or any form of identity resuscitation. A violence that demands these women summon titanic strength simply to keep living.You may now wonder: how can femininity be a force in such a context  especially when it seems, at best, to offer partial joy, or at worst, to mask inner pain and rage?

But maybe we need to rethink what femininity truly means. Long viewed as superficial, femininity has often been stripped of strength, intelligence, or emancipatory potential. And yet femininity, your femininity can and must be reimagined as a way to carve a path, not to conceal wounds, but to rebuild from them.

Your femininity can become the path that brings you back to yourself. It can be a way to learn how to love yourself deeply, to value yourself independently of external relationships. It doesn’t distract from the pain it helps you tame it, allowing you to become the subject of your own story again. A femininity unique to each woman, one that serves as a vehicle for empowerment and self-knowledge a way to exist without tying one’s identity to the gaze of others. A femininity that teaches you to define your worth, not through others, but through self-esteem and self-love.

When femininity becomes this identity quest a gentle yet determined force that drives us to truly love ourselves then yes, it becomes fair to ask: What if the power you hold lives in your femininity?