Clodagh Finn: Gisèle Pelicot gave us a mission for 2025 — ‘Shame must change sides’
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Time Magazine has, again, chosen Donald Trump as its person of the year. I get it. His presidential comeback was momentous. And the magazine does explain it picked the individual who, for better or [take note] for worse, did most to shape the world and the headlines over the past 12 months.
I would have chosen Gisèle Pelicot, the 72-year-old French woman who turned her own unimaginable suffering into a powerful plea to shape a better world.
I hold out hope, though, that she will make next year’s cover because, by then, we will be able to see that her extraordinary actions have added new impetus to a movement already underway.
By waiving her anonymity to call out one of the worst sex offenders in modern French history — her own husband — she did much more than expose the pervasiveness of rape culture. She gave us a rousing catchphrase, “Shame must change sides”, and sharpened our collective determination to use it.
In the year ahead, let us hope that the momentum for change so evident at the mass rape trial in Avignon will coalesce into a global movement on the scale of #MeToo.
In a sense, #ShameMustChangeSides is more empowering because as well as telling the victims of gender-based violence they are not alone, it also sends the loud, booming message that any shame they may feel does not belong to them.
That shame belongs firmly on the shoulders of the perpetrators, if only they would bear it. And there’s the rub. What was clear during the trial of Gisèle Pelicot’s ex-husband Dominique and the 50 other men he invited into the couple’s home to assault and rape his then wife, was their blank refusal to accept any blame, not to mention shame, for their actions.
Just 12 of the men admitted guilt, while many others said they thought Dominique Pelicot’s consent was enough.
It is staggering, too, to see just how eager seemingly ordinary men were to answer Pelicot’s online call for accomplices to attack his heavily sedated wife. The French press dubbed them ‘Monsieur tout-le-monde’, or Mr Everyman.
Some 50 faced trial, but police say an estimated 70 men, aged between 26 and 74, were involved. Among them, a prison guard, a construction worker, a firefighter, a nurse, and a journalist. Two in three had families of their own; a statistic that has prompted a widespread discussion about the normalisation of sexual violence. One of the most uncomfortable questions in the post-trial ether is this: How many men would rape a woman (or indeed anyone) if they thought they could get away with it?
I prefer to focus on the positive; the socio-cultural earthquake that has followed in the trial’s wake. The fault lines echoed globally as women rallied around Gisèle Pelicot to support and thank her for speaking up for Ms Everywoman.
Her valiant stand builds on an important French legal precedent which, coincidentally, was established by another woman named Gisèle.
In the 1970s, activist lawyer Gisèle Halimi helped to rewrite France’s definition of rape when she represented Anne Tonglet and Araceli Castellano, two Belgian women who also waived their right to anonymity. The women, a couple at the time, had been backpacking near Marseille in the summer of 1974 when they were assaulted and raped by three men, Serge Petrilli, Guy Roger, and Albert Mouglalis.
They filed a complaint but they were, they said, discredited and humiliated by everyone in authority, including the police, the medical profession, and the prosecutor who took their statement.
Gisèle Halimi took on their case and, in doing so, also took on French attitudes to sexual violence and the outdated legal system which considered rape as assault and battery.
After four years, she succeeded in having the case upgraded to the Cours d’Assises, a criminal court for serious crimes, and the men were sentenced to between four and six years in prison.
That trial might have rewritten France’s definition of rape but, half a century later, the Pelicot case shows that much still needs to be done.
Dominique Pelicot received the maximum 20-year sentence for his crimes, but the other men got terms from three to 15 years. Some were handed down suspended sentences.
The case has prompted much discussion about attitudes to sexual violence and how those attitudes have inveigled their way into the legal system to blunt the full force of the law. That discussion is welcome and overdue.
The most significant outcome of the case, however, is that Gisèle Pelicot has rewritten the script on shame.
Her insistence that “shame must change sides” has ignited a movement not only in France but elsewhere.
It is one that began here in 1993 when Lavina Kerwick did something seismic by speaking publicly about her rapist. Since then, tens if not hundreds of Irish women have stood on the courtroom steps to put the blame, and the shame, back where it belongs — on the rapist.
One of the most recent examples of that kind of indescribable courage came earlier this month when Lisa O’Meara waived her anonymity to urge other victims to seek help.
After her former partner, Barry Murphy of Shamrock House, Grogan, Ballycumber, Co Offaly, was jailed for 14-and-a-half years for rape and coercive control, she had a message for other women in abusive relationships:
Many others have also transmuted the horror of their suffering into a message of hope to others.
There are too many to name here — a positive sign of change, perhaps — but I salute every single one of them.
Thanks to them, shame really is changing sides, but we must ensure the momentum continues.
One way of doing that is showing that women all around the world are now breaking the silence that allowed shame to germinate for so long.
In 2023, for example, rape survivor Fatoumata Barry testified on live TV in the high-profile trial of Moussa Dadis Camara, former president of Guinea, and his military commanders for killing 157 pro-democracy supporters and raping more than 100 women.
In July of this year, he and six other leaders were found guilty of crimes against humanity, carried out during a peaceful democracy rally in a stadium in the country’s capital, Conakry, 15 years before.
Now, Nomi Dave, a former lawyer who studies how rape survivors and their allies speak out about sexual violence, and filmmaker Bremen Donovan are working on a documentary, Big Mouth, about women’s testimony against sexual violence in the West African country.
Big Mouth. What a wonderful name. It encapsulates within it the idea that those who speak out are loudmouths breaking the rules, but also the deep cultural shift that allows them to do so. It is only in continuing to speak out, loud and clear, that shame will finally change sides.