We welcome women from all over France to our bi-monthly Zoom support group! Members of the English-speaking community in Paris are not exempt from the plague of domestic abuse, and this website was established to offer both advice and support to abuse victims. Our main initiative, a free support group run by professionals working on a volunteer basis, aims to provide a setting in which English speaking women in the Paris area, who are or may be experiencing domestic abuse in their partnerships, can find out more about the subject, learn what their options are, or simply share their stories, fears and hopes in total safety. For a long time, domestic violence, though widespread all over the world, was totally unacknowledged as a problem. Some societies – even some states in the U.S. – gave men the legal right to beat their wives. It wasn’t until about 50 years ago, with the advent of the feminist movement, that society at large in the West began to take domestic abuse seriously and are now gradually deploying measures to protect women from abusive men. Even now, domestic violence is a leading cause of injury to women, and it is estimated that in the U.S., more than three women are murdered daily by their intimate partners; in France one woman is killed every three days in this way. Despite progress, both regarding awareness of the problem and measures to combat it, intimate partner abuse is still under reported. The insidious nature of the phenomenon induces many women to believe that they are responsible for it. They therefore feel too ashamed to admit to anyone what is going on in their couples, much less seek assistance for themselves. We hope this site will help women (and men when necessary) realize that certain recurrent behaviors in their couples indeed constitute abuse, and get from our group the impetus to take action on their own behalf.
