This game bar in Caen is also a shelter against street harassment
By Christophe Jaquet
Published on
So far, “fortunately, no one has needed it”. Éric Schaeffert, one of the two founders of La Case Départ, a fun café on the banks of the Orne, near La Prairie in Caen (Calvados), is almost relieved. In July 2021, he registered his establishment on themobile app keep your body. He thus made game bar a “place of safety”, in other words an identified refuge for the victims of street harassment.
To his knowledge, it is still the only bar or club listed as a shelter in Caen.
A guardian angel app
The Garde ton corps application was created in two days in 2019 by Pauline Vanderquand, after she was followed in the street and felt insecure near Aix-en-Provence.
It offers two main features to its more than 40,000 subscribers. Via geolocation, member night owls can be followed on their return home by people they trust. On the way, the registered “safe places” are assigned to them.
If they face “serious danger”, an emergency message can be sent to their contacts or to the police. This SMS even indicates the exact geolocation of the users and the battery level of the phone.
“We would have done it even without an app”
At La Case Départ in Caen, Éric Schaeffert learned about the Keep Your Body app while watching “a Brut report on Instagram”. For him, registering his brewery was “very simple”, and “very quick to set up”.
Making La Case Départ a shelter, “was in the logic of things. We want to be a welcoming place for as many people as possible. We would have done it even without an app. Even if it costs us nothing”.
Seated one afternoon in the middle of a good hundred board games, available at any time for customers, Éric Schaeffert remains convinced, with hindsight, that street harassment, “it’s not something that on many encounters in Caen”. Especially “in that neighborhood”, a little out of the way.
But if someone ever needs to take refuge there, Éric Schaeffert and his partner, Léo Gommard, feel ready. “It is part of our job to be able to defuse this situation. It could happen. You just have to know how to react. »
Practice. Brasserie Case Départ at 23, quai Eugène Meslin, in Caen. Contact: 02 61 92 33 19.
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