For four months, the entire world has followed the struggle of Gisèle Pelicot, the 72-year-old woman who was drugged by her husband for nearly a decade so that dozens of men would abuse her inert body. Since the case was uncovered in 2020, Gisèle has worked to stand up to her attackers and this year she has seen how France sentenced all of the 51 accused of rape or assault aggravated sexual
The greatest sentence has fallen for her now ex-husband, Dominique Pelicotwho at all times admitted the facts of which he was accused. The rest have received sentences ranging from 3 to 15 years in prison, in a sentence considered lax by many feminists in the country, but which has been applauded by politicians.
The Avignon court has closed the case, while the Pelicot family has thanked the support received in recent months. The judicial process, held at all times with open doors, has taught key lessons in the field of sexual violence, while also revealing the scourges of a sexist society and leaving loose ends to be resolved.
If something has become clear in the case against Dominique Pelicot, it is that there is no standard profile of the rapist. The 51 defendants had between 22 and 72 yearsand each one exercised a different job: firefighters, nurses, journalists, soldiers, delivery drivers or even retirees. Nothing united the men who came to rape Gisèle Pelicot, beyond a home near the municipality of Mazan, where the couple lived, the fact that they were men and that they all remained silent, thus allowing the attacks to continue for nine years.
Gisèle Pelicot has been seen by experts as “the perfect victim”, in the sense that she had sufficient evidence to report the violations suffered and no type of fight against her attacker was expected of her, since she was under the influence of anxiolytics and sleeping pills. The septuagenarian has taken advantage of the loudspeaker obtained with the trial to give a voice to “all those women who may never be recognized as victims,” she said at the beginning of the process.
And the majority of rape cases in France go unpunished. According to data from the French Government, 94,000 women suffer sexual abuse every year and, Of every 1,000 reported cases, only 12 end in a conviction. The difficulties increase in cases of chemical submission, a “phenomenon little known and still greatly underestimated in France,” considers the association M’endors pas (Don’t put me to sleep, in French), founded by Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian.
In France, only 10% of victims of chemical submission report the facts. “The phenomena of control and the fear of repercussions Social and family problems prevent victims from speaking or acting. And in the case of chemical submission, not having clear memories of the aggression or the aggressor and not recognizing the symptoms make it particularly difficult to become aware of the condition of victim,” they say.
If the violations against Gisèle Pelicot were discovered it was not because any of those involved spoke out, but because a security guard discovered Dominique Pelicot capturing images under the skirts of some young women in a supermarket. The police investigation revealed an electronic folder with the name “Abuses”, in which the septuagenarian stored 20,000 videos and images of the sexual assaults to which he subjected his wife.
In the hundreds of videos stored by Dominique Pelicot, up to 72 different men appeared, but The police only managed to identify a total of 49 attackersjoined by Pelicot himself and Jean-Pierre Maréchal, who learned Pelicot’s methods and applied them to his own wife.
At least 23 men have been left out of the judicial process, to which are added six more names who, although convicted, will not go to prison. Their sentences, of 5 years or less, would have already been served in provisional prison.
Gisèle Pelicot was asleep, in a state close to a coma and unable to give her consent to the acts that were committed on her. Even so, only 14 of the accused have admitted to having committed rape, while the rest have expressed different excuses to try to prove that the victim had agreed, in some way or another, to the sexual relationship.
Both the accused and their lawyers have argued that the men came to the Pelicot home deceived and manipulated, that the husband’s consent was enough or that it was a sexual game within the couple. Likewise, some of the lawyers have started to insinuate that the victim was an alcoholic or that she had exhibitionist inclinations to try to justify the videos that showed their clients committing sexual assault. Despite all the arguments, justice has considered that consent was never granted.
The case, however, has revealed the lack of a definition of consent in the French Penal Code. Currently, rape is understood as “any act of sexual penetration, whatever its nature, or any oral-genital act committed on the person of another or on the person of the perpetrator by violence, coercion, threat or surprise”, without mention consent in the text.
The reform of the legal concept of rape to include consent is something that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, already proposed in March, but the initiative was paralyzed with the early elections in June. Now, the French Ministry of Justice seems to want to regain the initiative. However, doubts remain among feminist jurists about how it will be carried out and whether it will be enough for consent to be key when judging rape.
