You had to go through a frontal impact to open your eyes. A husband, Dominique Pelicot, who drugged his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, for a decade to rape her and have her raped by others. Dozens and dozens of men recruited on the internet who break into the privacy of an inert body. Videos proving the horror. We had to go through the extraordinary trial of the Mazan rapes to understand on a large scale what sexual violence is, the diversity of the profiles of those who commit it, what they do and above all what they destroy. Everywhere, all the time, as you read these lines.
By allowing the world to enter the court and its hell, Gisèle Pelicot overturned the table of shame so often gripping the victims. She made it a seat of dignity for all these other women who have been colonized by male violence. The media coverage was immense, the international echo, the complex collective conversation integrating both women and men, and real awareness.
Don’t stop along the way
In Avignon, the verdict has just sealed the fate of the 51 co-defendants: all are found guilty, and the sentences imposed range from 3 years in prison, including 2 suspended, to 20 years in prison for Dominique Pelicot. As this historic hearing adjourns, it is our responsibility as a society not to stop along the way. Because the Mazan affair is the tip of an iceberg that just needs to continue to emerge. A continent where one in five women, in Switzerland, has already suffered non-consensual sexual acts. Where 92% of victims did not file a complaint and where 90% did not even contact the police, notably out of shame, fear that people would not believe them or because they thought it would be in vain (gfs.bern for Amnesty International Switzerland, 2019). There are also these adults still walled in the silence of the incest they experienced as children. And all these people who have no tangible proof of what happened between four walls, four eyes, and stole a part of their being.
Not stopping along the way means accepting, each and every one, that this will only be achieved collectively. It’s educating our children in unconditional respect and consent. It is having the righteousness to ask ourselves if we could one day have behaved inappropriately – or worse – and to take responsibility for them. It means having the finesse to extract the fight against sexual violence from an infertile debate pitting “progressives” versus “reactionaries”. And the courage to act on our scale, from our political arenas to our police stations, from our courts of law to our marital beds. Even when it’s uncomfortable, destabilizing or criticized. Gisèle Pelicot took action. It’s up to us to prove that we can do it too. Our loves, our nights and our tomorrows deserve it.
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