Gisèle Pelicot, a 72-year-old woman who had retired to a small village in provincial France, has become a heroine not only to compatriots but to people thousands of miles away, rightly saluted by global leaders and ordinary citizens alike. In refusing anonymity, and insisting that the trial of her ex-husband and other men for raping her be held in public, she has forced a broader recognition that “shame must change sides”. Her extraordinary courage and composure shone through the grim hearings.
For almost 10 years, Mrs Pelicot’s husband of decades drugged and raped her, and sedated her so that dozens of others could rape her at his instigation. Dominique Pelicot was caught by chance after a security guard caught him filming up women’s skirts at a supermarket, prompting police to seize his computer equipment. But he has since admitted an attempted rape in 1999, after police matched his DNA to a sample from the scene, and is under investigation for a 1991 rape and murder that has similarities with that incident. He denies involvement.
Yet while Pelicot is one of France’s most serious sexual offenders, he is in one sense typical: most offenders are known to their victims and many are their partners. The scale of the trial also made it clear that sexual predators are not rare or anomalous. Fifty more men stood trial and were found guilty; about 20 more have not been traced. These were ordinary men of all ages and backgrounds, including a nurse, a journalist, a fire officer and truck drivers. Several experienced childhood sexual abuse, but others described idyllic upbringings. In the words of the Pelicots’ former daughter-in-law, abuse is a “banality” because “abuse is everywhere”.
The case raises hard questions about France’s culture and its legal system. The necessity of consent is not inscribed within the law. Yet women around the world could easily envision this apparently unimaginable crime happening in their countries, their neighbourhoods – perhaps even their homes.
Though Mrs Pelicot has reminded women that the shame lies with their attacker, not with them, her abusers have yet to absorb that lesson. She appeared surely irreproachable to even unreconstructed observers: a married pensioner who had been attacked while unconscious and whose husband admitted orchestrating the rapes, with men he often met in a chatroom entitled “without her knowledge”, in crimes captured in graphic videos.
And yet most of her attackers denied rape and their lawyers asked her whether she was a swinger, exhibitionist or alcoholic; why she was not angrier with her husband; why she did not cry more in court. One perpetrator said that he “had not paid attention” to whether she had consented; another that “the husband had given me permission”. The wife of one suggested that “because I refused him [sex] all the time, as a man, he had to look elsewhere”.
In other words, though the reckoning Mrs Pelicot has forced is remarkable, it is only partial. Campaigners and Mrs Pelicot’s children have expressed disappointment that sentences were as short as three years, with two sentences suspended.
Mrs Pelicot deserves our gratitude. But though she is a survivor and a campaigner, she is also a victim who lives with the lifelong consequences of four sexually transmitted diseases and who has described herself as “totally destroyed”. And though her courage has inspired so many, no woman should have to be this brave or this strong. The politicians who have applauded her must now make good on her demands for change by ensuring justice for other women and addressing the culture that enables such crimes.
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