As the horror of how Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife, Gisèle, and allowed at least 83 men to rape her continued to unfold in a French courtroom last week, it was hard to see how the case “could have been worse” as one local official suggested.
Louis Bonnet, mayor of Mazan, the southern French town of 6,000 people where the Pelicots and a number of the alleged rapists lived, who added that “no one was killed”, later apologised and admitted his words were not “entirely appropriate”.
For French feminists and women’s activists, however, Bonnet’s ill-judged comments encapsulated how France has failed to respond to the #MeToo movement and is “abysmally” lagging behind in addressing sexual abuse socially and legally.
Anne-Cécile Mailfert, founder of the feminist organisation Fondation des Femmes, said that the fact that such a comment could be made about a trial “which symbolises the worst that male violence can do” showed the challenges that women were up against. “It demonstrates exactly what we are facing, which is not just rape culture, but the culture of impunity,” she said.
Anna Toumazoff, a feminist writer and activist, added: “It’s an example of how men still struggle to understand what we face as women and that is the real problem.
“It’s the product of a society that fails to protect women or regard them as full human beings.”
Ever since the global #MeToo movement emerged, encouraging victims to raise and report sexual and sexist abuse, France has struggled to change attitudes towards those who do.
Accusations against a number of high-profile figures, including actor Gérard Depardieu and directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon, have failed to shake the whiff of what is often called Anglo-Saxon puritanism attached to the movement in French minds, despite their protestation of innocence.
In May, in the face of growing frustration at a lack of change after the number of rape cases dismissed without any action rose to 94%, a petition signed by more than 140 public figures, published in Le Monde, called for a new wide-ranging law against sexual and sexist violence.
“#MeToo has revealed reality plunged into denial: sexist and sexual violence is systemic not exceptional,” they wrote. “One affair seems to follow another. Who is listening to us?” Mailfert, one of the petition instigators, said the Pelicot case unfolding in Avignon showed how desperately a new “integral law” was needed.
“We have regularly demanded this each time there is a specific case,” she said. “We can only hope this time it will lead to a wide-ranging law that would cover how police treat complaints in the beginning, how they are investigated, then how they are tried and judged. This would enable society to move forward towards resolving these issues.
“In France there is a debate over whether #MeToo has gone too far. ‘Is it really that bad if someone puts their hand on someone’s bottom, after all it’s just a gesture? Is it really that bad to take a photo of up someone’s skirt? It’s just a photo.’ All these seemingly small crimes should be taken seriously because someone capable of putting their hand on someone else’s bottom without their consent or taking a photo up a skirt is perhaps capable of doing something much, much worse. As we have seen in this case.”
Dominique Pelicot’s abuse of his wife was only caught after he was spotted by a security guard filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket and arrested.
Mailfert added: “We should not forget that it was only a matter of luck that Dominique Pelicot was stopped. It was lucky that the security guard that caught him … detained him, called the police and did not let him off with a warning.
“It was lucky the woman up whose skirt he filmed pressed charges. It was lucky the police didn’t have a hundred more serious things to deal with and pursued the case, looked at his computer and found out what he was doing.
“Had none of this happened, he would have surely continued. What seemed like a small incident was an indicator of something much more serious. It was part of a continuum of violence.”
Mailfert said any new law should also address how victims are treated in court. Last week, Gisèle Pelicot, 72, was forced to remind the court that she was not on trial after facing what she called “humiliating questions” from the bench and defence lawyers about her clothes, her drinking and whether she had consented to sex with the 50 men in the dock along with her husband accused of rape.
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“With all the debates, I feel like I’m the guilty party and the 50 victims are behind me. In fact, they should be sitting in my place,” Pelicot said.
The profile of those in the dock has also highlighted what women’s campaigners have called the “banality of male violence”.
The 50 men, aged between 26 and 73 at the time of their arrest, include a councillor, a journalist, a former police officer, a prison guard, a soldier, a firefighter and a civil servant.
Many were the couple’s neighbours in Mazan and had no previous criminal records. Of the 50 accused, 35 have denied the charges.
Mailfert added: “Mazan has resonated in France because it’s Mr and Mrs Tout-le-Monde, seemingly ordinary people we can identify with.
“We keep hearing it’s not all men, but as this case shows it is quite a lot of men.”
Rebecca Amsellem, a French-Canadian economist and founder of the feminist newsletter Les Glorieuses, said she hoped the trial would prompt change and be a “wake-up call for men”.
“We hope it will change mentalities and not result in a return to business as usual once it is over,” she said.
“This is a very unusual case, but there have been so many high profile #MeToo incidents and each time we think this is the one … and then it’s not.”
