The Men Who Raped Gisèle Pelicot Were Not Ordinary.

Acknowledging this enables us to more effectively protect women and girls.

Photo by Shubham Sharma on Unsplash

Today, important feminist writer, Victoria Smith. asked this question:

There has been a lot of (understandably!) very angry discourse around the Pelicot case and the horror of Dominique Pelicot having arranged for at least 50 men whom he filmed to rape his wife Gisèle as she lay in an unconscious, drugged state. Mme. Pelicot has drawn great admiration and deep sympathy as she waived her right to have the videos kept from the jury and onlookers for the sake of her own privacy and dignity saying, “It is not for us to have shame - it’s for them.” The level of bravery demonstrated by this remarkable woman who endured the repeated violation of her body and the ultimate betrayal of her husband - the man she most trusted and believed to be the ‘perfect man’ - and came out fighting is astounding. She refused to feel shame and forced her rapists to watch the vile acts they perpetrated on her in front of a courtroom despite the pain this must have caused her. She did this, not only for herself, but for all women who have been subjected to sexual assault and felt too violated, too traumatised and too ashamed to pursue a public court case or have done so but felt that violation, trauma and shame afresh throughout the process - a second assault. Mme. Pelicot said,

I am a woman who is totally destroyed, and I don’t know how I’m going to rebuild myself. I’m 72 soon and I’m not sure my life will be long enough to recover from this.

Yet, she went through the entire court case and gave her consent to the showing of those videos. The widespread admiration for Mme. Pelicot is highly warranted.

It is not for us to have shame - it’s for them.

And yet, this issue of who precisely the ‘them’ who should have shame are has caused some, including those who consider themselves feminists, to respond very poorly, unethically and unhelpfully in their commentary on this case. Julia Long, of the Party of Women, responded by appearing to hold Mme Pelicot at least partially responsible for having had a relationship with a man in the first place. J.K. Rowling provided the perfect response to this attitude.

Many people have commented on description of the rapists as ‘ordinary men’ that has frequently been made The rapists have been described thus because they had such normal jobs and roles in all parts of society - a butcher, a soldier, a nurse, a lorry driver - and are men one could expect to encounter routinely in one’s daily life and never know what they were capable of. We often like to think that we would know if we were in the company of a man who fantasised about and then participated in the rape of women - that some aura of evil would emanate from him. No, in this sense, they were, indeed, ordinary men and that is terrifying. Some pieces written about the case have used Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil” to describe how seemingly ordinary people participated in the Holocaust.

However, some feminists have used the phrase ‘ordinary men’ not to convey that seemingly ordinary people can be monsters, but to convey that it is ordinary - commonplace, standard, normal - for men to participate in serial rape. This is simply not true and it is not only deeply unjust to the vast majority of men (whom many feminists making this argument would tell me I should not be caring about in the current context or possibly any context) but also deeply counterproductive to the aim of addressing sexual violence against women.

It simply is not ordinary, commonplace, standard or normal for men to behave like this. If it were, the Pelicot case would not be making international news and eliciting such strong reactions of shock, horror and outrage. We’re not seeing women responding to the trial with, “Yeah, I think my husband’s been drugging me & inviting the neighbours over to rape me again.” We’re not seeing men responding with, “Jeez, political correctness has gone mad. What is the world coming to when men can’t even drug their own wives and orchestrate a decade of serial rape?” (It felt disgusting even writing that). We are, rightly, seeing people of both sexes recognising this appalling case as both morally abhorrent and morally aberrent. Such a heinous case of serial sexual assault has shocked the world precisely because it outrages and disgusts people and sexual violence against women is widely regarded as one of the most appalling and unforgivable crimes. Sex offenders in prison typically have to be segregated for their own safety because other men, who may have committed crimes like murder, grievous bodily harm and armed robbery are likely to try to kill them. This case is certainly not ordinary even if the rapists had jobs that were ordinary.

Nevertheless, while sexual violence against women is not ordinary, it does remain a crime that is all too common. In the UK, crime statistics reveal that 193,566 sexual offences or attempted sexual offences had taken place in the year ending March 2022 which was a 31% increase on the previous year. While we can hope that some of this increase is due to more people reporting it, we cannot be confident of that and the real figures are certainly much higher precisely because so many go unreported. The same report revealed that about 2.3% of adults (3.3% women and 1.2% men) had been victims of sexual assault (including attempts) which equates to an estimated 1.1 million adults (798,000 women and 275,000 men). The majority of victims are women and the vast majority of perpetrators are men.

Due to the devastating impact sexual assault has on the survivors and the high rates of reoffending, it is something that needs to be taken very seriously and addressed effectively. To do that, we need to accept the statistical reality that the vast majority of sex offenders are men but the vast majority of men are not sex offenders. Then we can focus on better identifying which men present a risk, what factors make him a risk, how to recognise this and intervene earlier and how to protect women most effectively by improving prosecution rates. Turning the issue into a ‘battle of the sexes’ narrative and making the problem ‘men’ is counterproductive to that aim.

We cannot address the problem of sexual violence against women if we ignore statistical and observable reality and make the problem not “sex offenders” but ‘men.’ How could that problem even be addressed? A mass culling? Concentration camps? Castration? While feminist aims to address sexual violence against women on a social and cultural level have included valuable initiatives that include things like educating young people on consent, I think we have to accept that on a social and cultural level, almost everybody already knows that sexual assault is wrong. Offenders who engage in it simply don’t care and do it anyway, acting against social norms. This is why sexual offences typically take place behind closed doors and in secluded places and not in the supermarket or on the high street.

I have tried to address issues of sexual violence against women online, creating threads of valuable studies into criminology that provide useful information. These have included advice that advocates better psychiatric and social services for boys in abusive homes, the early detection of callous and sadistic traits, the intervention upon and separation of groups of boys who aid and abet each other in misogynistic and sexually harassing speech and behaviours in schools, the identification, monitoring and intervention of subcultural groups of adult men who engage in such behaviours, better monitoring of online forums that cater to sexual offenders and policy change that allows for the creation of a secure database that stores the names of men who have been accused of sexual crimes but against whom accusations have been withdrawn or charges have not been able to be brought. (One team going through case files manually found that over a third of names appeared more than once but the police had no easy way to check this and bring the victim statements together making a successful prosecution much more likely). While some feminists have seen value in these kinds of studies, many others accused me of seeking to deny that there is a problem with men as a whole and engaging in ‘not all men’ evasions. However, seeing as how there is not a problem with men as a whole and sexual violence is engaged in by far from all men, I must plead ‘guilty’ to that charge. I must also plead with such feminists to see such studies as a valuable resource for developing initiatives and campaigns to reduce sexual violence against women rather than the presentation of them as an anti-feminist political statement.

In this particular case, the ‘ordinariness’ of these men only applies to the sheer range of mundane jobs they had. We need to look at what stood out about them. This was that they all belonged to an online forum called ‘Without Her Knowledge” in which sex offenders whose sexual offending centred around fantasies of raping unconscious women found each other to share their fantasies and, as in this case, conspire to commit sexual offences. Many of them also had criminal records for sexual violence, violence against women and other crimes. An online forum for sex offenders known as ‘Chikans” was also at the centre of a case I wrote about recently involving Abdulrizak Hirsi. These sexual offenders formed an international dark subculture centred in Japan but had many forums all over the world in which men shared the paraphilia of ‘frotteurism’ in which they fantasised together about rubbing their exposed penises on women in crowded places and reported their crimes to each other. An online forum called “Abduct Lovers” was also at the centre of the foiled attempt to abduct, rape and murder the UK TV presenter, Holly Willoughby.

By focusing on the ordinariness of the jobs held by the rapists who participated in a decade of horrific abuse against Gisele Pelicot to create a political narrative about such sexual offending being ordinary behaviour for men, we obscure the distinguishing extraordinary features which marked these men out as a danger to women and also fail to identify practical steps which can be taken to prevent this from happening to other women. These rapists shared a particular prediliction for sexually offending against unconscious women and they were able to find others who shared their precise twisted fantasies and conspire to commit their crimes using social media forums. If we look at how the plan to abduct Ms. Willoughby was foiled and the ringleader sentenced to life imprisonment before he had committed a sexual offence, we find that an undercover police officer in the US had been infiltrating such forums and was able to draw the intended perpetrator into conversation and then alert UK authorities. Therefore, it seems likely that one effective form of activism to prevent sexual violence against women and girls could well be to form campaigns to create initiatives that seek to find these kinds of forums, infiltrate them to identify sex offenders conspiring to commit crimes or reporting already having done so and arrest them. Alternatively or in addition to this, campaigns to find and shut down such forums thus preventing sexually predatory men from being so easily able to find others who share their dark fantasies with whom they can conspire to turn them into realities. While such initiatives would be unlikely to ever be 100% successful, they would be, I suggest, a more effective way of responding to the horrific crimes committed against Mme. Pelicot and protecting other women and girls from going through the trauma she did than creating political narratives about her rapists exhibiting ordinary behaviour for men, and spreading them about online.

Therefore, I return to Victoria Smith’s question, “Of what use is this ‘no true ordinary man’ fallacy to ordinary women?” in response to a psychiatrist testifying that they could not be considered ordinary men because that would indicate that ordinary men and thus all men are capable of such acts, which is not true. I would respond that the usefulness of accepting that it is true that such acts are not ordinary and not ordinarily engaged in by ordinary men is that it enables us to focus on what the extraordinary features of those men and that case were. It allows us to identify a specific twisted sexual offending fantasy as their motivation and a specific online forum as the means by which they were enabled to conspire to commit their crime. It indicates potential effective actions that can be taken to find and intervene on such men before they have committed a sexual offence or before they can commit any more. This is useful for the protection of ordinary women.