“Young girls denounce more but are still massively victims”

Five years after #Metoo, what has this freedom of speech movement changed among young girls today? It was this audience of teenage girls that Nantes journalist Florence Pagneux was interested in for many months. At 41, she publishes this Thursday “What our daughters have to tell us” (ed. La mer salée), a journalistic essay based on investigation conducted among 800 young women aged 13 to 20, which she used as a base. ” There are numbers very challenging, which show that the new generation of young girls still feels massively in a situation of inferiority compared to boys, and this in all aspects of their lives, reports Florence Pagneux. They are 8 out of 10 to be harassed in the street, 84% to not dress as they wish, 4 out of 10 to think of not being able to exercise the job of their dreams…”

For the journalist, the big change produced by #Metoo is that now young girls, for some children at the time, say “loudly” that they don’t find it normal and that they want it to change. “They identify it better and denounce it more, and in particular on social networks which are an important sounding board. They are also very numerous to define themselves as feminists, and yet they are still massively victims of all this violence, notes the journalist, herself the mother of a pre-adolescent girl. The survey says, for example, that 26% of them experience love violence, with situations of control that degenerate into sometimes more serious situations. »

The switch between words and deeds “not yet done”

For Florence Pagneux, who deals in her book with various questions such as gender, eating disorders or access to pornography, “the switch between words and deeds has not yet been made”. It must be said that if things are starting to move, the taking into account of this expectation by the institutions is still slow. “Where there is a real deficit is in sex education classes,” says the author. They have been compulsory since 2001 but in practice are very little organised. When they are, they revolve more around the prevention of STDs or unwanted pregnancies, questions that mask other essential aspects such as girl-boy relationships, feelings, or even consent…”