By Terre & Femme | Gender, Justice & Climate DeskSource: Official video communiqué, Institut National de la Femme (INF), Présidence de la République du Bénin — “Échos de la CRIET” series
When the State Becomes a Feminist Actor
In a political landscape where feminist advocacy has long been delegated to civil society organizations navigating structural underfunding and institutional indifference, a recent video published by the Institut National de la Femme (INF) of the Republic of Benin marks a significant if cautiously optimistic — shift in the state’s posture toward gender-based violence (GBV). The communiqué, released under the rubric “Échos de la CRIET” (Echoes of the Court for the Suppression of Economic Crimes and Terrorism), documents the prosecution of a case identified as MP, INF and Victim vs. M’PO Gabriel — a criminal proceeding centering on sexual abuse against a 12-year-old girl.
The video is not merely informational. It is, in its very architecture, an act of feminist communication: combining official institutional framing with dramatized reconstruction sequences, and concluding with an unambiguous normative statement delivered directly to camera:”Cette affaire rappelle qu’une relation avec une mineure de 12 ans est toujours un crime, peu importe le consentement, et que la justice béninoise s’assure de sanctionner ces actes.”(Translation: “This case is a reminder that any sexual relationship with a 12-year-old girl is always a crime, regardless of consent, and that Beninese justice ensures that such acts are punished.”)
In a sociocultural environment where the myth of child consent continues to circulate as exculpatory discourse particularly in cases involving girls perceived as “mature,” complicit, or even culpable — this declaration by a state institution carries real feminist weight.
The INF: Architecture of Institutional Feminism
Understanding the significance of this video requires understanding the institution behind it.
The Institut National de la Femme was established in its current configuration by the Beninese Council of Ministers on 21 July 2021, superseding the earlier Institut National pour la Promotion de la Femme (INPF). Unlike its predecessor — primarily a research and reflection body the INF was reconstituted as a state organism with full legal personality, financial autonomy, and crucially, the right to initiate legal proceedings and constitute itself as a civil party in GBV-related cases (Wikipedia, Institut national de la femme, 2025; lescompetencesfemmesbenin.social.gouv.bj).
This last prerogative is transformative. It means the INF does not merely document violence against women and girls — it actively participates in prosecuting it.
The case against M’PO Gabriel is a direct exercise of this legal standing: the INF appears as a named party alongside the Public Prosecutor and the victim, signaling that attacks on women’s bodily integrity are not purely private matters but offenses against a collectively defended public order.Presided over by Maître Huguette Bokpè Gnacadja since March 2023, the INF has pursued an ambitious strategic plan for 2024–2030, developed in partnership with the UNDP, aimed at building a comprehensive, multi-sectoral response to GBV in Benin (UNDP Benin, 2023).
The CRIET’s Expanded Mandate: A Legal Feminist Frontier
The choice to route this prosecution through the CRIET — originally created to combat economic crimes and terrorism — is itself legally significant and feminist in its implications. In recent years, the CRIET’s mandate has been expanded to include a range of gender-based offenses: rape, forced or early marriage, sexual harassment, aggravated violence against women, female genital mutilation, and sexual assault (Droits des Femmes au Bénin, Changement Social Bénin, 2022).This expansion constitutes a structural feminist intervention within the justice system.
The CRIET’s specialized nature — relative speed, centralized competence, reduced susceptibility to local social pressures — offers potential advantages over conventional tribunals where GBV cases can be delayed, minimized, or settled through informal negotiation that silences victims. The “Échos de la CRIET” series by INF functions as a jurisprudential communication strategy: it documents convictions, names perpetrators, and broadcasts the legal consequences of gender-based violence to a mass audience through social media, effectively using each case as both precedent and pedagogy.
12 Years Old, No Consent Possible: The Feminist Epistemology of Absolute Protection
The normative core of the INF’s video message is a feminist epistemological claim: a 12-year-old child cannot consent to sexual activity, and the question of consent is therefore legally and morally irrelevant. This is not merely a reiteration of Beninese law — it is a pedagogical intervention against a deeply rooted cultural logic that treats child sexuality as a matter of degree rather than absolute prohibition.
Feminist scholars working within African contexts have long argued that the legal protection of girls requires not only legislative clarity, but sustained counter-normative communication — the active dismantling of cultural frameworks that construct girls’ bodies as available, that conflate physical development with adult agency, or that assign blame to victims through discourses of seduction and provocation. The INF video, by deploying dramatized reconstruction alongside institutional authority, performs precisely this counter-normative work.
The framing is unambiguous: there exists no relational or contextual configuration in which a sexual act with a 12-year-old ceases to be criminal. This absolute position is not morally arbitrary — it reflects the understanding that children’s developmental vulnerability renders consent a conceptual impossibility, not merely a legal fiction.
The Persistent Challenge: Data, Culture, and the Gap Between Law and Reality
The INF’s communicative activism takes place against a sobering epidemiological backdrop. According to the UNDP, Benin recorded more than 11,216 victims of gender-based violence in 2021 alone, of whom only 1,460 cases were referred to police or judicial authorities — a referral rate of barely 13% (UNDP Benin, 2023).
This disproportion between experienced violence and institutional redress reflects what feminist scholarship terms the “justice gap”: the chasm between the theoretical protection afforded by law and the practical protection available to women and girls in daily life.An Afrobarometer survey (Round 9, 2022) further reveals that 65% of Beninese respondents considered it likely that a woman would be criticized, harassed, or humiliated by community members if she reported GBV to police (Afrobarometer, 2024).
Impunity is thus not solely a product of judicial failure — it is actively reproduced by social norms that penalize those who seek recourse and protect those who commit violence.This structural impunity is compounded by what researchers identify as economic causality: poverty (23%) and financial precarity (11%) are among the factors most frequently cited by Beninese citizens as root causes of GBV, underlining the necessity of linking feminist advocacy to economic justice frameworks (Afrobarometer, 2024).
Girls from impoverished households are disproportionately vulnerable to sexual exploitation, trafficking, and forced unions precisely because poverty functions as a mechanism of coercion — a condition in which “consent” becomes a profoundly distorted category.
The INF’s Feminist Methodology: Legal Clinics, Royal Courts, and Digital Communication
What distinguishes the INF’s current approach is its multi-scalar feminist methodology operating simultaneously at the levels of law, culture, community, and media.In June 2025, the INF organized a legal clinic in Pobè, bringing together magistrates, public prosecutors, lawyers, police officers, and medical professionals to strengthen the institutional chain of GBV response. The clinic aimed to instill what the INF terms the “réflexe INF” — an institutionalized reflex ensuring that every actor in the judicial chain responds to GBV cases with competence, speed, and victim-centered practice (Gouvernement de la République du Bénin, June 2025).
Simultaneously, INF President Huguette Bokpè Gnacadja undertook advocacy missions to the royal courts of Savalou and Abomey in September 2025, meeting with traditional monarchs to build alliances between state feminist institutions and customary authorities. The strategic insight underlying this approach is significant: in Beninese society, customary leaders retain substantial normative authority over family and gender relations. Their endorsement of anti-GBV norms does not merely add symbolic weight — it can actively shift the social acceptability of violence and the willingness of communities to support victims who seek institutional redress (Gouvernement de la République du Bénin, September 2025).
The INF’s digital communication strategy — of which the “Échos de la CRIET” video series is a centerpiece — complements these in-person interventions. By transforming legal proceedings into accessible narrative content distributed through social media, the INF performs a critical translation function: converting the abstract authority of the law into vivid, emotionally legible stories of justice. Each video names a perpetrator, narrates a crime, and announces a sanction. In feminist terms, this is naming violence publicly — a practice long advocated as essential to dismantling cultures of silence and shame.Toward a Feminist Critique: Progress and Its LimitsA feminist analysis of the INF’s work cannot, however, content itself with celebration. Several structural critiques demand articulation.
First, the institutional feminism of state bodies is inherently constrained by the political context in which they operate. The INF is attached to the Presidency of the Republic and depends on presidential will for its resources and mandate. This proximity to executive power is both an asset — enabling access, resources, and legal standing — and a liability, insofar as feminist priorities may be instrumentalized for political legitimacy rather than pursued as substantive transformation.Second, the expansion of CRIET jurisdiction over GBV cases, while structurally significant, raises legitimate feminist concerns about access to justice.
The CRIET is a centralized institution; many of Benin’s most vulnerable women — rural, poor, with limited mobility and literacy — face formidable barriers of physical, economic, and informational access to this court (Changement Social Bénin, 2022).
Jurisdictional ambition must be matched by investment in victim accompaniment, legal aid, and geographic decentralization.Third, the 76% of Beninese respondents who, per Afrobarometer data, demand that police and courts do “more” to protect women and girls represent an extraordinary feminist mandate — but one that remains aspirational rather than operational absent serious budgetary commitment. Legislative architecture without fiscal architecture is feminist theater.
The INF’s video on the M’PO Gabriel case is, at its core, a counter-narrative — a deliberate act of meaning-making in a culture where violence against girls is routinely rationalized, minimized, or rendered invisible.
By occupying the space of public communication with the language of accountability and the image of institutional consequence, the INF performs a feminist function that exceeds its strictly legal mandate: it redefines what is normal, what is sanctioned, and what constitutes justice.
The declaration that “consent is irrelevant when the victim is 12 years old” is not a legal technicality. It is a feminist axiom — one that places the integrity of the child’s body beyond the reach of negotiation, tradition, or desire. That this axiom now issues from a state institution attached to the Presidency of the Republic of Benin is, for all its ambivalences and structural limitations, a feminist development worth both acknowledging and demanding more of.Feminist struggle in Benin has never been the exclusive property of formal institutions. It lives in the refusal of rural women to accept violence as destiny, in the insistence of girls that their futures are not forfeit to patriarchal exchange, in the courage of survivors who speak where culture demands silence.
The INF’s work, at its best, serves this struggle — not as its center, but as one of its levers.SourcesInstitut National de la Femme (INF), official video communiqué, “Échos de la CRIET: Affaire MP, INF et victime contre M’PO Gabriel”, Présidence de la République du Bénin. Published on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1241645251514567/Institut national de la femme, Wikipédia, last updated September 2025. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_national_de_la_femmeGouvernement de la République du Bénin, “Clinique juridique innovante à Pobè : L’INF intensifie la lutte contre les VBG”, June 2025. https://www.gouv.bj/article/3126/Gouvernement de la République du Bénin, “Violences basées sur le genre : L’INF renforce son engagement pour protéger les femmes”, September 2025. https://www.gouv.bj/article/3246/Gouvernement de la République du Bénin, “Campagne des 16 jours d’activisme : La SE de l’INF annonce les couleurs”, November 2024. https://www.gouv.bj/article/2875/UNDP Benin, “Pour une meilleure promotion des droits des femmes et filles au Bénin”, 2023. https://www.undp.org/fr/benin/actualites/pour-une-meilleure-promotion-des-droits-des-femmes-et-filles-au-beninAfrobarometer, “Violence et discrimination envers les femmes au Bénin”, Dispatch No. 848, September 2024. https://www.afrobarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/AD848-Violence-et-discrimination-envers-les-femmes-au-Benin-Afrobarometer-4sept24.pdfChangement Social Bénin, “Droits des femmes au Bénin — Actes du colloque”, 2022. https://changementsocialbenin.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Actes-du-colloque-sur-les-droits-des-femmes-au-Benin.pdfLes Compétences Féminines du Bénin, “Institut National pour la Promotion de la Femme: De nouvelles ambitions”. https://lescompetencesfemmesbenin.social.gouv.bj/
