when the Mazan rape affair shakes couples and families

At the coffee machine at work, during family meals or during evenings with friends… Gisèle Pelicot’s legal fight has been part of numerous discussions since its opening at the beginning of September, allowing women to address the subject of gender-based and sexual violence with their loved ones.

Since September, the Mazan rape case has invaded Garance’s home. In recent weeks, this trial has even become a regular subject of discord between this 50-year-old Ile-de-France resident and her husband. In the eyes of her companion, Dominique Pelicot and the dozens of men who raped Gisèle Pelicot in her home for years while she was unconscious and drugged are none other than “sexual deranged”. “Monsters” which would be an exception.

“He is fleeing the discussion, it seems like he is in a form of denial,” fumes his wife, to whom he has been married for more than 20 years.

The subject is “hot”, to the point of shaking family relationships. “My 16-year-old daughter doesn’t let him get past anything, so one wrong word and it always ends in an argument,” she says. “Especially since he has a tendency to turn the situation around and find that it’s not easy for ‘good’ men like him, which can make her very, very angry. In these cases, she calls him ‘ouin-ouin’ and leaves the table, upset.”

“I know she is disappointed with his reactions,” she continues. “From his recourse to the formula ‘not all men’ (‘not all men’, in English) to clear himself and exclude himself from the problem, which we find a little easy.”

However, in this extraordinary criminal case, the investigation revealed that most of the 51 accused were “everyman”. Worker, unemployed, retired, firefighter, prison guard, journalist or soldier… Men aged 20 to 68, far from the image of the pervert who rages in a dark alley. “There is no typical profile among rapists,” researcher Véronique Le Goaziou, author of the book Le rape, explained to BFMTV.com. Sociology of a crime.

“It has become a subject of arguments at aperitif”

Beyond weakening the relationship between her daughter and her father, the affair also destabilizes the fifty-year-old’s couple. “It raises a lot of questions for me, I feel like it’s damaging something,” she confides. “I have the impression that he’s not interested, and that makes me wonder about the lack of willingness of men to really listen and hear our reality,” explains Garance, for whom her husband’s “awareness” “is not up to par at all.”

“The Mazan affair has become a subject of arguments at aperitif,” confirms Hélène Verzier, committed actress and former parliamentary assistant, who has quarreled with several friends and colleagues in recent weeks.

If she happened to argue about this with women around her, Hélène Verzier is especially annoyed by this news item, which involves a large panel of men “representative of French society” – in the words of the victim’s daughter, Caroline Darian -, does not question “the guys about their own attitude”.

“When I talk about it to colleagues, to friends in their forties around me, they tell me that they don’t have to question themselves since they wouldn’t be capable of doing that,” she assures. . “Each time, it’s the same injunction not to put them all in the same basket. They take great care to portray (the accused) as monsters, which allows them to distance themselves and get out of the debate.”

A way to “sort out” your relationships

The fifty-year-old says she is tired of having to assume the position of “the ‘ballbreaker'”, the one who must “educate the husband, the friends, the uncles, the father”.

“When we tell them that this type of violence is our daily life, they don’t listen, and all they can say is how wonderful they are,” she laments.

Nathalie, director of a real estate agency in Béziers (Hérault), is nevertheless pleased that this highly publicized affair is an opportunity “to open debates that we would perhaps not have opened in normal times”. “As a woman, I know that it allows me to sort out my relationships, depending on how people will view this matter,” explains this 50-year-old woman.

Exchanges are particularly difficult with men from previous generations. “Whether it was my 80-year-old father-in-law or my father, we tried to open their eyes by putting things into perspective, by giving the example of Abbé Pierre or Depardieu but it is very complicated. .. They come from another generation where we didn’t talk about these things at all,” she continues, tiredly.

A liberation of speech

But in those around her, the Mazan affair also made it possible to free the speech of several generations of women. During a family meal, some guests began to question Gisèle Pélicot’s words, which gave her the strength to defend her and reveal to those close to her that she had also been the victim of sexual assault when she was 14 years old.

“It blew up a lot of things, and to my greatest surprise everyone started talking,” says this mother.

Her 20-year-old daughter also confided that she had experienced attacks. Her own mother later said she had already been raped in her sleep by her former husband. “Women say to themselves ‘if she managed to speak, then me too’, and that’s also what the media coverage of this trial is for, and that’s why we can salute the fact that Gisèle Pélicot has chose to take on this fight, by refusing to go behind closed doors,” explains Amy Bah, activist and member of the Nous tous collective in Lille.

“There is a collective awareness of women who are starting to ask themselves the question ‘how can I still trust the men around me?’, and to realize that in reality, the probability of being attacked by a man that we know is very real,” she comments. And for good reason: the National Observatory on Violence Against Women of the Ministry of the Interior recalls that in 90% of cases of rape or attempted rape, the victims know their attacker.