A loyal listener of Radio France for over twenty years, I am taking the liberty of writing to you today for an unusual reason. Like any regular listener, on many occasions I have been annoyed and disagreed with certain comments or certain broadcasts. However, until now I have never felt the need to take up mediation.
If I take the trouble to write to you today, it is because the sequence broadcast in Les Matins de France Culture, on June 8, devoted to the Lyhanna affair, particularly shocked me. I had the feeling that the conduct of this interview was out of step with the requirements for quality, rigor and listening which, in my eyes, make up the value and reputation of Radio France.
It is precisely because I attach a lot of importance to this radio station and the quality of its programs that I feel the need to express my discomfort with this broadcast.
Guillaume Erner wanted to answer you:
Why the word “systemic” doesn’t convince me
Many listeners were shocked by Monday’s show, during which I challenged the use of the term “systemic” regarding sexist and sexual violence. Perhaps I insisted too much – that’s also the point. This is why I want to return here, calmly, to the heart of the matter: to explain why the notion of “systemic violence” does not convince me.
Three things first, which go without saying but which are better said.
The first: to refute a word is not to minimize a reality. Contesting the term “systemic” does not attenuate in any way the seriousness of sexist and sexual violence, their scale, nor the suffering of those who suffer it. It is precisely because this violence is serious that it deserves more than a word on screen.
The second: my objection does not only target VSS. I formulated it, in the same terms, about “systemic racism”, inCharlie Hebdo as in my work as a sociologist, my thesis in particular, devoted to the sociology of anti-Semitism. It is therefore not a matter of circumstantial reluctance, but of a constant position.
The third: this opposition is first of all epistemological. It concerns what the word explains, or rather what it does not explain. That’s why.
To say that sexist and sexual violence is “systemic” is, at best, to “transform something inexplicable into something unexplained”, to use Wittgenstein’s formula. The word gives the feeling of understanding; he only names. It leaves unanswered all the questions that matter. Why do some societies experience higher levels of sexual violence than others? Why do these levels vary over time, both upwards and downwards? The characteristic of a system is to produce stability, reproduction, balance. But society is anything but stable: it moves, it transforms, behaviors evolve, thresholds of tolerance shift. A notion that postulates permanence is poorly equipped to think about change. Its heuristic interest is, its scientific usefulness, in my eyes, almost zero.
Where does this notion of system come from? It is the direct heir of structuralism, that moment of French thought when we believed we could explain societies as we describe a language: by invisible structures, prior to individuals, which would speak through them. From Saussure to Lévi-Strauss, from Althusser to certain uses of Foucault, the gesture is the same: men believe they are acting, but it is the structures which act within them. “The structures don’t go down to the streets,” we said ironically in May 68, and the formula said the essential: by dint of looking for the system behind the actors, we end up losing the actors, and with them the history, the event, the change.
Now we can be skeptical about structuralism, and many were, of the best writers. Sartre saw in it a machine for dissolving freedom, Raymond Aron a scholastic, and empirical sociology has survived him by showing, survey after survey, that human behavior is explained by situations, interests, beliefs, not by mute totalities. Structuralism is dead as a scientific program; it survives as a language reflex. To say “systemic” is to do Lévi-Strauss without knowing it, and without rigor: it is to summon the ghost of a theory that the social sciences have, for good reasons, abandoned
Then, because the systemic explanation is a holistic explanation and, fundamentally, irrationalist. It brings into play an abstract totality, “the system”, where the logics of the actors should be restored: those of the predators, who choose their victims, their moments, their impunity; those of institutions, which cover up, which turn a blind eye, or on the contrary which sanction; those of the entourage, the witnesses, the accomplices. Simone de Beauvoir, already, refused these explanations which dissolve the freedom and responsibility of individuals in abstract entities – that was her existentialism. A sociology worthy of the name does not cause an evil spirit to hover over heads; it describes situations, interests, calculations, cowardice It makes actions intelligible, which is the very condition for combating them.
Finally, because politically, the word does not work any more. If the system is guilty, which individual is still guilty? To say that everyone is guilty is to say that no one is. Responsibility is diluted in the great social bath, and the aggressor becomes the symptom of a structure rather than the author of his actions. It’s a bad deal for the victims, who need the culprits identified, tried, convicted; it is a boon for the guilty, who find in the “system” the most convenient mitigating circumstances.
All these critiques come, it seems to me, from the same fault: a race towards verbal radicality which produces the opposite of what it claims to aim for. The bigger the word, the less it bites into reality. David Graeber, who one would not suspect of lukewarmness, wrote inThe impasse of the ontological turnÂ: “In my most cynical moments, I sometimes think that social theory is a kind of game, where one of the goals is to see who can come up with the craziest, most shocking, most seemingly dangerous idea, but which does not significantly challenge existing structures of authority. HAS”
The word “systemic” has all the appearances of radicalism; it has none of the effects. He intimidates in debates and does not worry any attacker. For my part, I prefer a less spectacular and more demanding sociology: one that asks why, here and now, men attack women and children, why institutions protect them, and how to make this stop. It’s less noisy. It is, I believe, more useful, including and first of all for the victims.
William Erner.
Hello Guillaume Erner,
I guess I’m not the only listener writing to you.
I would like to react to what you said to your two guests on the morning of Monday 08.06.26. Your subject was the violence against children in reaction to the murder of little Lyhanna. From the moment you said “I am the only representative of the patriarchy here”, I understood, like many women I think, that we were going into trouble. I guess you didn’t really mean that, since it doesn’t mean anything, you meant that you were the only man at the table. And so here we are: you feel attacked by two people who denounce the violence of the patriarchal system and you defend yourself. When you say “I’m a man” and “I don’t think that’s the problem,” we hear the famous “Not me!” Not me! “, which we are constantly told. This is what will make your guest say a little later, obliged to lower herself to this zero level of the debate, “not each of the men”.
You invite two specialists on the subject so that they can share with us their analysis, the fruit of years of work, and you say no, as a man I tell you that patriarchy is not the problem. The fact that you object so strongly to your guests, in my opinion going completely beyond your role, even allowing you to correct them on a vocabulary in which they are nevertheless specialists, seems to me precisely systemic (it’s funny, it’s precisely this word that made you wince). You were suddenly, despite yourself I hope, the perfect representative of this system in question. A system which does not want us to name it and identify it, which denies existing and being at the origin of the violence. When your guest magistrate tells you: “I am confronted daily with the resistance of the patriarchy in my work”, you have the audacity to tell her: “no, you are not confronted with the patriarchy”. There was no need to invite specialists if you already had all the answers!
You say “the father of the family can only be horrified”: this is not true. The father knows he must be horrified. Obviously all men, like yourself, say “it’s horrible to rape and kill a child”, but these famous 160,000 children per year who suffer sexual abuse, who are they abused by? They are not abused by two or three deranged people who will now have to be punished more severely. They are being abused by the fathers that you defended so much that morning.
Not each of all the fathers in France, I assure you, certainly not you, but they are MASSIVELY attacked by a father, a brother, an uncle, all these men who seem normal and who are horrified by Lyhanna’s death.
We can see very clearly how you refuse that this is a systemic problem when you say: this child was not attacked in her family, she is not part of the cases of intra-family violence. You try throughout to save the figure of the father of the family. This is what the patriarchal system does: it saves the figure of the father, makes him untouchable. Furthermore, it turns out that Lyhanna’s murderer was a father (the mother of another of his victims said in an interview “he was a father, I couldn’t imagine him raping children”). The investigation will tell us, I hope, how he treated his own daughters, they are probably part of the cases of intra-family violence.
This is how we see that it is a system: child rapists are not some raving madmen who could be considered monsters and excluded from society. Rapists are society. They’re not sick, not outcasts, they don’t look weird, they’re perfectly integrated, they have a job, their child’s picture on their desk, and they told everyone on Monday how horrified they were by Lyhanna’s death. And probably they are. But they rape their children and those of others. For what ? Because the system allows it. Not the law, not the public and official word, but the patriarchal system yes.
The complete denial you showed on Monday is unfortunately banal. It is this denial that prevents these terrible figures from progressing. It is this “resistance” (as your guest put it so well) which means that there is no budget to take care of this, no effective measure, which means that almost no rape is punished. This is because those who could pass laws, release budgets, elect people to do so, are part of the patriarchal system, defend it, indulge in it, consciously or unconsciously, because it is to their advantage.
Your reaction is sadly banal, but as a journalist who speaks to almost a million people every morning, your responsibility is immense. Like everyone else, you have the right to make mistakes. Correct the situation, rise to the occasion, please. I strongly recommend reading The Cradle of Dominations by Dorothée Dussy on this subject.
Loyal listener of France Culture, psychologist, but also a simple committed citizen, I wanted to share with you my uneasiness while listening to the morning show of Mr. Guillaume Erner (for whom I have a lot of respect, I would like to point out), on Monday June 8, 2026.
On three occasions, Guillaume Erner contested the use of the term “systemic” to describe violence against women and children. He notably stated: “It is not systemic because society as such disapproves of it. » (25th minute)
Then: “I don’t like the term systemic since it has a precise meaning in sociology, it means that there is a system which promotes a certain number of facts, in this case sexual predation, but precisely the system, the system of values for example, does not promote that at all. (…) This man who had four cases, how is it possible that this man was left at liberty, it was not the values of society which left him at liberty, it is a legal system and not at all a societal system. » (28th minute)
I am not a sociologist and do not claim to settle an academic debate. On the other hand, it seems to me that Guillaume Erner presented as evidence a very particular definition of the term “systemic”, asserting that a phenomenon could only be qualified as such if it were promoted by society or by its system of values (where the speakers opposed the question of tolerance, which participates in a system without necessarily going through its promotion).
Now it seems to me that a significant part of the social sciences uses this term in a much broader sense, to designate phenomena which are reproduced by social organization, institutions, power relations, norms or collective representations, without being explicitly encouraged or valued.
This is precisely what bothered me: not that a debate exists around this word, but that one of the possible definitions (the only possible definition according to Mr. Erner) leads to immediately dismissing the qualification of “systemic” concerning violence against women and children. On the contrary, the two speakers placed this violence in a patriarchal system of domination, without being able to be sufficiently heard on the air in my opinion.
As a psychologist, I regularly encounter the very concrete consequences of this violence. As a citizen, I find it damaging that such an important concept is presented in such a restrictive manner on a channel whose intellectual rigor I usually appreciate.
Like every morning, I listened yesterday – Monday June 8, 2026 – to the morning show and the interview with the morning guests, the lawyer Carine Durrieu Diebolt and the historian Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu.
I was – and still am – stunned by the holding of this interview and more precisely by Guillaume Erner’s virulent and very personal opposition to refusing to recognize sexual violence against children and women as systemic and having its origins in patriarchy – against research enlightened by the two invited specialists.
Mr. Erner’s attitude is a brilliant illustration of the resistance to the work of a part of society to think about the subject.
This morning, I chose not to listen to “Les Matins”.
Yesterday, Monday June 8, I listened to Guillaume Erner’s program on violence, in particular sexual violence against children. I was very surprised to see that the host revoked on several occasions and even sometimes by cutting off one of the guests, the characterization of systemic violence and the questioning of a patriarchy still dominant and in place.
He even tried to explain to the two guests (invited precisely for their expertise) why they were wrong. How sad to see that Mr. Erner has ticked all the boxes of the man who imposes his point of view, belittles the interlocutor in order to clear himself… “Not all men” well sums up his posture and his position yesterday. We expect better! Perhaps Mr. Erner could do more research on the evidence of the current persistence of patriarchy in France. If he is not aware of benefiting from this state of affairs, since he is a man, he should try to decenter himself a little and talk with women who experience it daily.
In any case he clearly showed that this systemic state of affairs did not need action on the part of the population, since he defended it in good faith. It was touchingly blind!
For almost two years, I have been a regular listener of the France Culture show “Les Matins” presented by Guillaume Erner. I generally appreciate the quality of the information relayed as well as that of the exchanges with the guests in the morning. The debates are often very well led by Guillaume Erner, whose journalistic rigor I regularly salute.
I was therefore deeply shocked and disappointed to hear the broadcast of Monday June 8, 2026 in which the journalist had invited two experts on the issues of sexual violence and child crime. In fact, I had never heard guests being cut off so often (by Guillaume Erner). The journalist regularly prevented them from following through on their remarks, questioned their expertise on numerous occasions and expressed positions that seemed far from usual journalistic rigor. How is it possible that on a subject so serious, so documented, a journalist from France Culture refutes the words of two experts without valid argument? How is it possible that he allows himself what is nothing other than mansplaining (a concept theorized and then analyzed by many intellectuals specializing in feminist issues)? Can we really, in 2026, deny the systemic nature of sexist and sexual violence, and violence committed against children? Can we brush aside the responsibility of the patriarchy in this violence?
I am deeply disappointed and shocked by the behavior of Guillaume Erner, who deprived listeners of an informed debate on essential subjects that concern us all. While we deeply need information and expert analysis on these terrible subjects, we have only had the right to an exchange polluted by the erroneous and unsourced remarks and assertions of a journalist who certainly lacks training on these subjects.
It would seem necessary to me to address this problem. It seems to me that it is the responsibility of France Culture to act to ensure that such situations do not happen again.
I’ve been listening to you every morning for years. I do not systematically agree with your positions, but I appreciate them in general because they are often argued and sometimes explicitly subjective, which allows everyone to allow themselves to follow you – or not.
I am reacting today and for the first time to the way in which you contradicted and finally erased, through your authority as host, the remarks defended by your two guests last Monday.
And I hesitate to understand what your motivations were.
Was this really based on the orthodoxy of the sociologist as you asserted (imposing on them your definition of what is systemic)? But then this was particularly unfair and reductive because their remarks went well beyond a linguistic quarrel.
Was it just manipulation by a journalist who absolutely wanted to refocus the debate on the questioning of justice and not on the societal causes of sexual violence against vulnerable people? If that’s the case, it’s very disappointing.
My third hypothesis is that you felt challenged by the comments of the guests as a member of the male gender. Which surprises me on your part but is not entirely impossible if we listen to the palpable tension with which you rebuked them. In this case I encourage you to think again about the question and listen to your show again. Your reaction has everything of a dominator’s contribution to the famous “system” whose terminology and even more so the existence of which you are discussing.
Hoping that you will read this message and take it for what it is: friendly and constructive feedback to avoid getting caught up in these biases in your next broadcasts.
What was my disappointment to hear Guillaume Erner interrupt and contradict at this point in such a subjective manner the specialists the lawyer Carine Durrieu-Diebolt and the historian Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu to discuss the failures of justice revealed by the Lyhanna affair.
Leaving no room for their expertise, he will argue that sexist and sexual violence is not systemic. That it is only a question of dysfunctions of the judicial machine. So not letting them expose their expertise. Very unpleasant in the morning.
Guillaume Erner seems to have some difficulty with the notion of patriarchy. To try to understand it, he can listen to his interventions cutting the two speakers, Monday June 8, very relevant to the subject of child crime in view of their training, research, publications, experiences. He allowed himself a session of mansplaining in great detail. Very painful to listen to. And very sad for the two guests.
I still remain shocked by the reaction of the journalist Guillaume Erner who dares to reprimand a historian and a lawyer to explain to them that they are wrong and that no, secular patriarchy does not explain the stagnant violence against children in the 21st century because, I quote, “patriarchy is the father of the family who protects his children.” I salute the calm of the guests in the face of so much audacity and invite Mr. Erner to listen to our observers, writers, historians, doctors, jurists.
I love the France Culture shows, however yesterday morning I came across the show “l’guest des Matins†by Guillaume Erner and I must admit that I was quite distressed by the host’s lack of knowledge regarding the issues of sexual violence, systemic violence, domination and the issues of patriarchy. I thought that it might be good for France Culture to train its hosts on such issues because the show gave the impression that the host took the exchange of the two guests (also very patient and with great professional qualities) personally and I found it extremely unfortunate that he does not position himself to be more attentive because what they explained with a lot of pedagogy is extremely important in the media, legal and societal treatment of violence against women and children. I think that an exercise in humility, information and listening without ego could have been useful today. In all cases I remember that the show was still very qualitative and interesting.
