The Virage survey, first results
Collection : Documents de travail
n° 229, 2017, 67 pages
The Violences et rapports de genre (Virage) survey was administered by telephone, in 2015, to a sample of 27,000 women and men representative of the population aged 20 to 69 years living in ordinary households in metropolitan France. We present here the initial analysis of sexual violence experienced in all the life spaces (school or university, workplace, relations with a partner or ex-partner, family and social circle, public spaces and other) during the last twelve months and over the life time.
In all the life spaces, the two questions about the experience of “forced intercourse, attempted forced intercourse, sexual touching” or “other sexual acts or practices” were followed by a list of precise acts, so that the responses could be classified ex-post into the legal categories of “rape and attempted rape” and “other sexual assaults”. This second category includes the answers to another question about forced kissing or fondling (not asked in the context of relations with a partner or ex-partner). In all these life spaces, the sexual violence rates are much higher for women than for men. Women experience violence of this kind throughout their life, in all the spaces, while for men it occurs mainly in their family and social circle during childhood and youth, but rarely with their partner. More often than men, women report repeated acts that they consider as serious or very serious.
