This is an edited and shortened version of an article by Silvia Reckermann, of the Action Group Equality Bavaria (AGGB), originally published in German.

“It was his house, his room, his bed, his wife!”

Apparently, Didier Sambuchi, one of the convicted rapists in the Pelicot case, reacted with astonishment and incomprehension when he heard that he would be prosecuted. He, like his 50 co-defendants, didn’t think that what they had done was nearly bad enough to involve the police. Even the few men who had been invited but did not take part didn’t report what was happening to the police or take any other action to end it.

The media and the public are now indulging in an outrage contest. But the defendants are still struggling to get their heads around their convictions and some are already planning appeals. After all, what had they done that was so different from what hundreds of other men do all the time? No one had noticed or even cared about the messages they’d been sharing online for years about their violent sexual behaviour and fantasies? Doesn’t that mean that society as a whole was involved? That by looking the other way and playing down sexual violence for decades, society was in fact complicit?

You may be thinking that this case was different because Gisèle Pelicot was unconscious and so there could be no consent. But no one can know whether a woman who visits swingers clubs with her husband, for example, is there out of her own free will. No one knows the intimate relationships, dependencies, threats and fears that motivate women to join in.

Unusually, Gisèle Pelicot has the full support of her family: all of her children have broken with their father, the main perpetrator. Too often we see the opposite: family members showing unconditional solidarity with rapists. This is also the case with some of the co-defendants, who see their “unblemished” family life threatened by the trial – rather than by their own actions.

Pelicot’s accomplices as johns.

Perpetrators of mass shootings, like the Hanau assassin, often express self pity because they lack having a suitable woman at their disposal. Apparently, the Hanau shooter thought he was entitled to a ‘good’ woman and raged that only prostitutes were available to him. He is not alone in this attitude. There are many men’s rights activists (men and women!) who argue that paying women for sex is a ‘human right’.

Apparently, payments were not involved in the Pelicot case, but the rapists displayed all the typical behaviours of johns (sex buyers):

• They thought it was normal for Gisèle Pelicot’s husband to hand over his wife’s body for them to use and abuse sexually.
• They had no qualms about using her body, even though the situation was incompatible with consent.
• They didn’t question what was happening and considered it completely acceptable.
• None of them, not even the men who refused to join in, reported what was happening to the police.
• They had a total lack of empathy for Gisèle Pelicot.
• Just like johns, they bragged about their behaviour online, including descriptions of the violence.
• They joined forces with other men in online forums in a competition to outdo each other’s misogyny.

The only difference was that the men who raped Gisèle Pelicot did not have to pay.

Why were Pelicot’s accomplices so indifferent to women’s suffering?

In the prostitution system, it is normal for men to rent women’s bodies from men (pimps) for sexual purposes. In France, both pimping and buying sex have been banned since 2016. But men have been socialised by pornography and the system of prostitution, which dehumanise women and treat them as commodities.

For a long time, libertinage was the hallmark of many French intellectuals. Violence against women has been acceptable in France, ever since the Marquis de Sade popularised it. Even though times have changed, thanks to the women’s movement, ‘tolerance’ is still widely practised – even by women. By this I mean a mixture of indifference and turning a blind eye to violence against women and girls. Unfortunately these attitudes are not confined to France. The Marquis de Sade has role models and emulators all over the world.

Not so long ago, a rapist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), had a good chance of being elected president of France. As a Socialist candidate, of all things! His downfall came about because Nafissatou Diallo, an African-American hotel employee, broke the silence and spoke out about the sexual violence he had inflicted on her. At first, nobody wanted to know. It was only much later that other victims gradually came forward. Shame was still on the wrong side, but Nafissatou Diallo set an important milestone in the fight for women’s rights in France.

Sexual violence against children as a lifestyle or educational “benefit”

Violence against women and girls is deeply rooted in our culture. In France there is a long list of cases of children and young people who have been sexually abused and exploited by ‘intellectual’ bon vivants and celebrities. France fills entire film collections and bookshelves with the trivialisation of the sexual abuse of children. In a self-satisfied bohemian society, some men make a hobby of destroying children’s personalities before they have a chance to develop. Not infrequently with the complicity of the parents.

Typically it is only decades later that victims come forward with the truth of what happened. But even then, they only have a chance of being heard if they can express themselves in an intellectual way. And outrage on a broad, national level, has failed to materialise – until now in the Pelicot case.

In Germany, abuse is particularly notorious in the church, in spite of vows of celibacy, and paedo-criminals have been active in a number of professional fields. Unlike in France, child sexual abuse isn’t romanticised in literary terms but the damage is just as bad. Some social and educational reformers succeeded in manipulating not only victims, but also professionals, politicians and the public, as happened in the Odenwaldschule, for example. And there is a worrying resurgence of paedo-criminals gaining influence.

Are all men guilty?

Regardless of the victim group, rape is always about the exercise of power and domination, often with a sadistic component. A brutalising one-sided war against women, girls and male children, waged with vastly unequal means.

Violence against women and children with the intention of gaining access to their bodies and breaking their will is no less culturally rooted in Germany, than in France and many other regions of the world (including the UK).

Does this mean that all men are perpetrators and should do some soul-searching and repent? No! If ALL men are perpetrators, NOBODY is ultimately responsible. There may be a round of consternation, a little posing in penitential garb, but NOTHING happens. Nothing changes.

Violence is not anchored in the genome and pointing to an abstract ‘patriarchy’ as the culprit will not lead to social change. We must name the real perpetrators and hold them accountable.

Not all men hang around on online platforms celebrating violence against women. Not all men are johns. And not all women are innocent; many women support male domination because it is advantageous for them. They sit in parliament and fight, for example, against any restrictions on prostitution, against the protection of marginalised women, in the interests of those ‘who do it voluntarily’ and in line with a hard-core neoliberal agenda. They the pillars of the patriarchy.

Placing the blame and guilt on men as a collective is a construct drawn from identity politics, attractive as an explanation for people who are lazy in their thinking. People who want to have the world neatly sorted into victims and perpetrators.

From collective indignation to a community of responsibility

Indulging in indignation can be intoxicating, but it does not result in effective political action. We reject the collective guilt of men. What we demand is collective responsibility.

Men in politics still like to assign violence against women and associated policy areas to women. It affects women, they say, so women should take care of it. That is so wrong.

Cohesion in society is not care work for women or even the task solely of a women’s minister. Cohesion won’t come about through propaganda. It requires deep, critical self reflection. Social cohesion is created and practised in relationships and families. The private sphere is political. And politicians must create a framework that ensures that violence of any kind in families and relationships is recognised and effectively punished. This is not a minor issue only affecting ‘marginalised groups’, but a mission to save our democracy.

When relationships between people in families, friendship networks, work environments and neighbourhoods erode, people often seek support from ‘substitute families’ on the internet, where they might be initiated into violence against women, and other anti-democratic projects. We all bear responsibility for ensuring that hate, agitation and polarisation are overcome and for renewing social cohesion.

Gisèle Pelicot’s mission

In France, legislation based on the Nordic Model has been in place since 2016. Men are no longer allowed to pay to use women’s bodies sexually. The law is successful and is leading to a change in men’s attitudes. It seems that there is now a generation of investigators who are able and willing to take a closer look at violence against women.

The police and investigating authorities pursued Pelicot for upskirting women and this led to the exposure of his more serious crimes, which might otherwise still be continuing. We should ask ourselves whether the authorities would have looked so closely and investigated so consistently in Germany (or indeed the UK). In Germany, which is regarded as the brothel of Europe, violence and other crimes against women involved in prostitution are so commonplace that people have become resigned.

Sweden has long understood that prostitution is violence and implemented that understanding when it introduced its Nordic Model legislation in 1999. France followed suit nearly two decades later. The European Parliament has confirmed that prostitution is not only largely based on violence, but that it is violence. The OSCE, the UN and many international organisations have long been calling for measures to tackle men’s demand for prostitution, because it “fosters all forms of exploitation of persons, especially women and children, that leads to trafficking”. The Nordic Model is the most effective way of doing this.

Germany must now decide whether it wants to be part of Western Europe – or whether it will continue to follow its own special libertine path, like the men sitting in the dock in Avignon.

Gisèle Pelicot is now rightly regarded as a feminist icon. She shared with the whole world the worst humiliation a woman can experience: her dehumanisation through serial rape – by her own husband. In doing so, she has set a giant milestone in the fight against violence against women and girls. Many will now have the courage to follow her example. All women in the world owe her a hefty debt of gratitude.

ENTMENSCHLICHT (‘DEHUMANISED’) is the title of a book by Huschke Mau. The author describes her sexual exploitation in the prostitution system with unsparing candour, just as Sandra Norak and many other former victims of the system have. They all mark milestones in the fight against violence against women.

What we must now demand from politicians in concrete terms:

• Reforms based on the Nordic model in the area of prostitution policy.
• Improved consent regulation for sexual acts.

Only when people accept that sexual acts must be based on consent – and that consent cannot be bought – will we have understood Gisèle Pelicot’s mission.

20.12.2022 Silvia Reckermann
Action Group Equality Bavaria, AGGB