Europe 1 with AFP 11:34 a.m., March 7, 2024
La Française des Jeux wants to transform its network of bar-tabac-press into a “place of refuge” for women victims of street harassment.
To do this, the FDJ is signing a partnership with Umay, an application which aims to fight against street harassment and insecurity.
Transforming the Française des Jeux bar-tobacco-press network into a “place of refuge” for women victims of street harassment: this is the objective of the FDJ and the Umay application, which signed a partnership on Thursday.
After "conclusive" experiments, carried out in Nantes and Lille, the lottery giant will offer "on a voluntary basis" to the 29,000 merchants in its network training delivered by Umay, an application which aims to fight against street harassment and insecurity, according to a press release.
An app that lists safe places for women
The application, which signed an agreement with the Ministry of the Interior in 2022, currently lists 3,200 gendarmes, 600 police stations and 6,000 establishments labeled “safe places”: bars, restaurants and nightclubs but also points of sale, stores and institutions, where users who feel threatened can take shelter.
Concretely, the application works like a GPS and offers routes where "safe places" and police stations are marked, and gives the possibility of designating trusted people who can follow the journey.
You can also send alerts on the application or report a danger.
You must create an account to be able to use it.
Umay claims 60,000 active members and has already signed partnerships with Monoprix, Île-de-France Mobilités (IDFM) and even local authorities.
The partnership with the FDJ will make it possible, “from 2024, to significantly increase the coverage of the application. A thousand FDJ points of sale will join the Umay network this year”.
“As part of the experiments carried out since 2020 with Umay in Lille and Nantes, more than 200 partner merchants have contributed to the deployment of the service and more than 95% of them have expressed their satisfaction,” assures the president of the FDJ Stéphane Pallez, quoted in a press release.
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The manager formalized this partnership on Thursday morning in a Parisian tobacco bar, accompanied by Pauline Vanderquand, founder of Umay, and Aurore Bergé, minister responsible for Gender Equality.
The partnership aims to train and label as many traders as possible before the summer of 2024 and the Olympics.
"FDJ is one of our historic partners; we urgently labeled 'safe places' during the 2020 lockdown. We will be able to train the teams at FDJ points of sale in actions that reassure people who are victims of street harassment or witnesses of attacks", explains Pauline Vanderquand in the press release.
While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that women take refuge in tobacco bars, where the clientele is generally mainly male, the president of the FDJ responds that these businesses "are already essential places of life, with opening hours "extensive openings and retailers involved in local life. That they become safe places is of undeniable logic and usefulness."
“So that all women, at all ages and everywhere on our territory never have to suffer violence again, the commitment of everyone is necessary,” comments Aurore Bergé, welcoming the initiative.
According to the latest annual report from the High Council for Gender Equality on the state of sexism in France, 9 out of 10 women say they anticipate sexist acts and comments, and adopt avoidance behaviors to avoid experiencing them.