Lydia Schenardi, on behalf of the ITS Group. – (FR) Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I particularly welcome the many efforts made by my fellow Members, and also by the Commission, to guarantee the implementation and proper functioning of the Daphne programme – which is designed to prevent and combat violence against women, adolescents and children – by providing it, among other things, with a specific budgetary heading and by substantially increasing its budget.

I should like to take this opportunity to emphasise a particularly disgusting development, incidences of which are becoming ever more apparent in our societies: the ill-treatment of newborn babies. Indeed, in France in particular, not a week goes by without our reading in the ‘news in brief' section about a new case of a baby being ill-treated or abandoned. This development, which is linked not only to poverty and social and emotional problems and to the inherent violence generated by our societies, but also to human behaviour tending ever more towards hostility and frustration, to selfishness and to a general lack of respect, could be curbed if more psychological and material support were given to women and to families in difficulty.

There is in fact an urgent need to take preventive measures for these families and these women in distress. However, these measures should also be supplemented by genuine criminal sanctions. Whether we are talking about rape or other forms of physical violence that sadly all too often result in death, the scale of sentences is not repressive enough.

The fight against violence also necessarily hinges on the way in which we treat the promoters of such violence. I am thinking of the Internet, where perverts and psychopaths can give free rein to their obsessions; I am thinking of video games, where sex and violence are legion; I am thinking of drugs and other psychotropic substances that put each consumer into a state of trance; and I am thinking of alcohol which, when consumed in excess, causes enormous damage, not least through its effect of ridding people of their inhibitions.

The fight to be waged against violence begins at the stage of educating our children and of building the future that we want to offer them.