Shame
The Triumph of Gisèle Pelicot
I recently watched the Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim Nash'at’s brilliant documentary Hollywoodgate, about Afghanistan under the Taliban. Nash’at was allowed by the Taliban leadership to film the first weeks of Taliban rule following the NATO withdrawal in 2020, on condition that he only filmed what the Taliban permitted. Not surprisingly, women are almost entirely absent, except for the few chilling glimpses of burka-clad women begging in the middle of Kabul streets, who Nash’at was able to film surreptitiously.
In Afghanistan, women have become shadows and ghosts. Not only are they physically invisible, but the ‘Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice’ has recently banned them from ‘singing, reciting, or reading aloud in public.’ Afghan women cannot be seen or heard, but they can be raped and tortured if they break any of the Taliban’s decrees, or try to uphold women’s rights in a country where women have no rights.
Like Islamic State, or the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, or Boko Haram, Taliban prison guards rape female prisoners because that is what holy warriors in the path of God tell themselves they are allowed to do, and they also rape in the knowledge that they will always get away with it. This is a country where shame is reserved for the victims not the perpetrators. In 2010, a ten year old girl raped by a local mullah was at risk of an ‘honour’ killing by her family and community members for having brought ‘shame’ on her family. According to Heather Barr, associate director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch:
The Taliban are aware of how much stigma is involved around the issue of sexual violence in Afghanistan and how incredibly difficult – and usually impossible – it is for victims of sexual violence to come forward and tell their stories, even sometimes to their own families, because there is a risk of shame and potentially ‘honour’ violence.
Much of the world rightly looks on such practices with horror and disgust. But Afghanistan is not the only country where shame is reserved for the female victims of rape, rather than the male perpetrators. In 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that 35.6 per cent of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. In 2010, UNICEF found that around 120 million girls worldwide under the age of 20 had experienced ‘forced intercourse or other forced sexual acts’ at some point in their lives.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where militias engage in what Human Rights Watch called ‘horrific levels of rape’ and other forms of sexual violence, most rapes are not reported because of the fear of social stigmatisation and the belief that women are responsible for ‘provoking’ their (armed) rapists.
In India, 31,000 cases of rape were reported by the government in 2022: that is, 85 rapes daily. Many other cases are not reported, in part, according to Mariam Dhawale, the secretary of the All India Democratic Women’s Association, because
Often, the victims are victimized further with insults, and it makes it very difficult for them to report the crime to the police. In such cases, women think it is best to keep quiet.
A 2024 public health study of rape survivors in South Africa (40,000 reported annual rapes over the last decade), found that women survivors were subject to ‘internalized stigma, shame and self-blame’, in a society where ‘rape myths’ include the following:
…that rape is driven by women dressing a certain way or being visibly drunk, women are ‘accidently’ raped because they ‘play hard to get’, rape is about men’s need for sex, and rapists are always strangers
Such myths are not unique to South Africa. Shame amongst female rape survivors is a ubiquitous phenomenon, even in countries that think themselves more enlightened in such matters. In the UK, 1 in 4 women aged 16 or over have been raped or sexually assaulted. From 1st July 2023 to 30th June 2024, 69,184 rapes were recorded by police, out of which charges have been brought in just 2.7 percent of cases. According to the Rape Crisis National Service, 5 in 6 female victims in this period did no go to the police; 40 percent of survivors claimed ‘embarrassment’ and another 34 percent said they thought it would be ‘humiliating.’
Some cases do become public. In the last two weeks, a man was found guilty of repeatedly raping and then killing an unconscious NHS worker in a London park. In Hertfordshire, a man went on trial for allegedly killing three women with a crossbow, one of whom was his former lover, who he admitted to raping. In Rotherham, two brothers were found guilty of rape as part of the police’s ongoing Operation Stovewood investigation into historic sex abuse.
You probably won’t have heard of the last two - and you certainly won’t have heard of them from the far-right defenders of ‘our’ women, because the two brothers were white, and therefore not politically useful pawns in racist patriot games. But women can be raped by anybody, and whenever this happens, they have to cross the barriers of shame, suspicion and stigmatisation that exist to a greater or lesser extent in almost every part of the world, in order to have even a chance of finding justice.
It is horrifying how normalised this is. Rape is often passed off as a ‘weapon of war’ - the supposed product of some exceptional lowering of the moral barriers that wartime stress brings out in young men. When the future Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas complained to Stalin about the rapes Russians had committed in the Yugoslavia they were supposedly liberating in World War II, Stalin replied, ‘Can’t you understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?’
Whether rape in wartime is rationalised as revenge and punishment, or ‘having fun’, it may also be simply taking advantage of an opportunity. Because rape is also a constant component of the social fabric even in peacetime.
Men and boys can be raped too, but women are faraway the most likely victims. Wherever they are, and whoever they are, women face the constant and pervasive threat of sexual violence. Men and boys can be killed and attacked by random strangers for a variety of reasons, but women and young girls are generally attacked by men for one reason only. As a result they must always be careful about where they walk, when they go running in the park or go out at night, about who they look at, and who comes too close to them.
This general condition is entirely routinised. Every parent with a daughter knows this. It’s the same in almost any country, anywhere, in a world where too many men still do not see women as fully human, let alone as fully equal, and view women through a prism of fear and hatred, domination and submission.
Rape - and the ‘right’ to rape, is just one consequence of this generalised misogyny that remains the scourge and shame of our species - and of the male gender. And yet in country after country, female victims of rape are the ones who have to overcome the stigma of shame in order to have even the possibility of achieving justice.
Monsieur Tout Le Monde
All of which brings us to the horrific crimes of ‘Monsieur Tout Le Monde’ - Mr Everyman - revealed in the largest and most shocking rape trial in French history. As much of the world now knows, the 72-year-old pensioner Gisèle Pelicot was married for more than twenty years to a man who drugged and raped her and invited other men to rape her while she was unconscious in her own home, over a ten-year period.
Domestic rape in itself is not unusual. Rape is not limited to guardians of religious virtue, soldiers, or random predators. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, 8 out of 10 perpetrators are likely to be known to the victim. Some of the men Madame Pelicot’s husband invited in to rape his wife actually knew her, and said hello to her in the street when she went out to buy bread or go shopping, not knowing what had happened.
And yet, in some secret rancid part of themselves, all these men, like her husband, believed that her body existed for their perverse ‘pleasure’.
Faced with such systematic depravity and betrayal, it would have been entirely understandable if Madame Pelicot had chosen to remain anonymous, as so many other victims have done before her.
Instead, she chose to go public. She attended the trial day after day, in the presence of her husband and his fellow-rapists. Plunged into in a 21st century provincial de Sadeian hell, in which she was ‘sacrificed on the altar of vice,’ as she put it, she made the conscious decision to place the shame and the humiliation on the men who had raped and assaulted her, rather than accept it for herself.
She did this day after day, with a quiet determination, dignity and courage that reminds you why humanity is worth fighting for, and justice is worth striving for. In doing so, she won a victory that was not just hers. In court, she wore a scarf designed by the Aboriginal artist Mulyatingki Marney, given to her by Australia’s Older Women Network, because, according to its president ‘A scarf is like a hug…It’s draped around your neck and it hangs close to your heart.’
In her closing speech, with her grandson on her arm she calmly told the world:
I wanted, by opening the doors of this trial on September 2, that society could take hold of the debates that took place there. I have never regretted this decision. I now have confidence in our ability to collectively seize a future in which each woman and man can live in harmony with respect and mutual understanding.
We are still very far from that. In the United States, millions of Americans have just voted for a man known to be a rapist and a sexual predator, a man who was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest associates. Since then, Trump has appointed at least four men to high office with accusations of rape and/or paedophilia attached to their names. All this, after having vowed to be a protector of women ‘whether they like it or not.’
This convergence of extreme right politics and toxic hypermasculinity is not an accident. As Talia Lavin has written, this was a ‘rape culture election’ in which white nationalists told women to ‘get back in the kitchen’ and jeered ‘your body, my choice’ to celebrate further limitations on abortion rights. Like the Taliban, these valiant Christian knights obsess about women, and assume for themselves absolute ownership of women’s bodies.
Despite decades of feminism, women’s rights activism and the Me Too movement, we are in a world in which ‘incels’ believe they have the right to kill ‘hot’ women who won’t have sex with them; in which rapists like Russell Brand and Andrew Tate are ‘influencers’ with millions of followers, and a rapist can be elected president.
Two women have told the BBC how Tate strangled and raped them, including one incident in which Tate left a voice message afterwards, declaring:
‘Am I a bad person? Because the more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it,’
The answer to that ought to be an unequivocal yes, because Tate is a very bad person indeed. As Coventry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre (CRASAC) pointed out, following his arrest in January 2023, ‘by using the cover of lifestyle advice, fame and fast cars he has built up a huge following in order to push his misogynistic and dangerous view towards women and girls.’
And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that millions of young men not only don’t care that Tate is a vicious misoygynist and an alleged rapist and sex trafficker, they want to be like him, just as millions envy the poisonous rapist who will be entering the White House next month - the same rapist who the UK government is reportedly preparing to invite for a state visit, by the way.
The Coventry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre have located ‘a culture of rape and sexual abuse’ as part of a ‘pyramid which begins with sexist, objectifying “jokes” and harassment. When our society tolerates attitudes at this level it has the effect of trivialising sexual violence and abuse.’
This is where we have been for a long time, and the election of Donald Trump - and the grotesque fawning over him - is just one more symptom of this toleration and trivialisation. And this is one more reason, why men and women of goodwill should take heart and inspiration from Madame Pelicot’s determination to ensure that ‘shame changes sides’.
She, not Donald Trump, should have been ‘person of the year’ on Time’s front cover. And just because Time, like so many others, preferred the rapist, does not mean that we are all obliged to do the same. Because when a woman shows the courage that Gisèle Pelicot has demonstrated over the last few months, then she - not the rapist - should be the object of our admiration. She should be the one who galvanises all those who believe that this world should be so much better than it is.
And the world will never be as good as it should be until women, wherever they are, can feel safe in the streets and in their homes, and the perpetrators, not the victims of sexual violence become the ones who, like ‘Monsieur Tout Le Monde’, must sit in court and feel shame.