“The Mazan trial shows that sexual violence occurs everywhere”

In the Mazan trial, which has been taking place before the Vaucluse criminal court since September 2, the profile of the accused is striking. They are an electrician, salesman, journalist, truck driver, carpenter, firefighter, among others, or what we commonly call Mr. Everyman. Is one of the challenges of the trial to break the myth of the predatory monster?

Quite. The Mazan trial is spectacular in more than one way. Firstly because it does not target an individual who would have caused several victims, but the opposite: we have several accused who have a single victim, which completely changes the relationship to sexist and sexual violence. Then, their profile is indeed disturbing because if we can grant the status of monster to Dominique Pelicot, we are prevented from doing so for the co-accused. The latter confront us with the banality of evil since they come from all age groups and all professions. In any case, they form a large representation of Mr. Everyman. This is why this trial is edifying: it demonstrates that sexist and sexual violence occurs almost everywhere, in family units, in homes, whereas, culturally, we tend to expect them either in evil exceptions or serial killers, or in public spaces.

However, according to you, those whom you call good fathers live in the illusion of not being violent men. According to them, it is always others who are guilty. A reasoning that does not hold here…

In reality, it rarely works, and not here. I believe that there will be a before and an after of this trial: this excuse of saying ‘I am a good father’, ‘I am well integrated into society’, will no longer hold up afterwards, because we are in demonstrating the opposite. It’s like saying that jogging alone in the evening is dangerous for women. This is false. The figures are unstoppable: for women in a relationship, the first danger is potentially the family unit.

Inhumanity at the bar of the Mazan trial

Not only do you defend the idea that monsters do not exist, but according to you, the monster theory is dangerous in that it maintains the myth that the private sphere is a safe place.

I believe that we would have everything to gain from reading sexist and sexual violence in this way. We would gain a lot of energy by stopping being surprised. Which doesn’t mean becoming cynical or thinking that everyone is potentially a rapist or a violent man, but rather stopping believing in ideas and looking at things head on, a little coldly. I have just seen the rebroadcast of Faustine Bollaert’s show “It starts today”, during which Dominique Pelicot’s daughter testified. This was long before the trial, long before we knew all the horrible details. On set, the reaction of the participants who discovered his story was to say: it’s unthinkable. I find that the word ‘unthinkable’ is important, because if we do not have the capacity to think about the facts, if we have constructed the idea that these men are incapable of violence, then we will miss others possible signals. When we are not trained to spot things, and the possibility of violence is unthinkable, then violence happens. Not thinking gives a form of invisible protection. We must deconstruct what prevents us from thinking.

The Napoleonic Code (1804) stipulated that “the woman and her entrails are the property of the man”. In your opinion, it is clear that mentalities have not evolved at the same pace as the law.

It’s obvious. At trial, it’s edifying. The accused began to defend themselves by saying that they had the husband’s authorization, and that, according to them, this delegation of consent constituted consent. We are still in this belief that the husband owns the wife and that he can do with her what he wants from the moment he has authority over her. It’s no longer in the law, but it has to be deeply rooted in them so that they say to themselves: if the husband gave his authorization, I am not guilty of anything. Because Gisèle Pelicot does not exist in this equation. We can therefore clearly see that this is not a question of law. Feminists are often told that they now have equal rights. However, we see that, culturally, situations of this order produce false beliefs.

The rapes having been filmed, one might believe that they are indisputable. Despite the evidence, the accused evade, exonerate themselves, when they do not lie. Why do they have so much difficulty admitting the reality of the facts?

I think if we start to unravel the thread, if they admit that what happened was rape, they can break down. As they are constructed in a binary mode – to be 100% monster or to be a good man – recognizing rape pushes them towards the side of monstrosity. And the brain resists this idea. In addition, those around them testify to their good sides. So there is something preventing awareness. But the most important thing for me is the lack of awareness of sexist and sexual violence. Feminists insist on using the right words: sexual assault and not wandering hands, femicide and not crime of passion, etc. We need a more factual and less interpreted qualification of the facts. However, on the men’s side, there is a lack of understanding of what rape is. Some defendants admitted the facts while denying that it was rape. It is clear that they do not know the subject at all, that they have no education on the subject. They think that if you don’t intend to rape, it’s not rape. Rape, for them, is being in a parking lot, a knife between your teeth, with the intention of raping. But generally speaking, society as a whole also has difficulty recognizing what rape is.

At the Mazan rape trial, faces froze: “Don’t hesitate to get out”

You show that, in many trials, the victims are discredited by the media. However, the media treatment is, here again, different.

The affair itself prevents media bias. Here, it was completely impossible to go against Gisèle Pelicot. On the one hand because there are hundreds of filmed evidence. On the other hand, because her profile corresponds to what society considers a good victim – even if they tried to smear her by showing photos of her in alluring outfits. To demonstrate what, anyway? That she would have looked into what happened to her? It’s horrible, but that’s the dirty game of lawyers. In the media, on TV sets, it was impossible to say that she had looked for him. So there was not the usual excesses of media discourse, which often calls the victim into question. Afterwards, as Valérie Rey-Robert, the author ofA French rape culturewe must be careful not to fall, secondly, into heroizing the victims.

For what ?

Because this serves those who have a less socially accepted profile or less evidence at their disposal. We must neither make exceptions on the profile of victims, nor make them individual matters. Gisèle Pelicot is at the center of an exceptional affair, but heroicizing the good victim still allows patriarchal language to distinguish good and bad victims. On the contrary, we must continue to decipher, explain what is happening, what is at stake, without forgetting that there will always be victims who will have less visibility, fewer elements in their file, which does not in fact no less good denouncers or less good complainants.

⇒ Rose Lamy | As good fathers | Essay | Threshold Points, 208 pp., €8.40