Euroviews. What do European elections mean for gender equality?

If alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a man?

This recent TikTok trend has revived an important debate about women’s safety, as almost all women on the platform, as well as X and Instagram, chose the giant wild animal.

Their responses are unsurprising. In every corner of Europe, offline and online, women face abuse. Some are stalked, some harassed, some assaulted. The problem is so entrenched and widespread across the EU that one in three women have suffered some form of sexual or physical violence.

While this viral discourse misses how most violence is perpetrated by intimate partners, it is a fact that, in the shadows of pandemic lockdowns, domestic violence cases have been rising sharply. In France, for example, more than 100 women are killed by their current or former partner every year, while a rape or attempted rape takes place every 2.5 minutes.

In even greater danger are LBTIQ+ women, women with disabilities, and migrant women. A recent study found that migrant women in France are nine times more exposed to sexual violence and 18 times more likely to be victims of rape.

There’s good news: not only has the EU ratified the Istanbul Convention, an international instrument for the protection of women, but it also recently adopted legislation to combat violence against women, including a ban on female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and cyber violence.

But two years of back-and-forth in Brussels negotiation rooms revealed a shocking lack of political will to end all forms of gender-based violence. France and Germany had scandalously allied with Hungary to exclude from the new law a definition of rape based on lack of freely given consent.

Rape is one of the most horrific but frequent forms of