‘Shame must change sides’

Illustration/Uday Mohite

As 72-year old Gisele Pelicot walked out of a French court last Saturday, the crowd gathered outside broke into applause.

The case being heard is against Dominique Pelicot, Ms Pelicot's husband of 50 years and 50 other men. For years Pelicot drugged his wife, invited other men to rape her while she was unconscious and filmed the abuse. His digital archive revealed nearly 80 men. 50 have been identified and charged. 30 remain unknown to all but themselves.

Ms Pelicot has waived the customary anonymity customarily of rape trials. She said, "shame must change sides". By making every aspect of the trial public she refuses the perpetrators a hiding place in the name of her privacy and ‘honour'. Her composure is remarkable. Words like brave are too tinny to describe it. As she has said in her court testimony, it masks "a field of devastation." That is why it is emotionally piercing and powerful, ricocheting across walls that ring the world with silence. Many of these walls are made of words.

Yvonne Roberts wrote in The Guardian, that many victims of sexual crimes do not feel media reports mirror their experiences. A 12-year study of media reports demonstrated that media focuses on stranger rape and rapists as monsters and deviants. But statistics worldwide overwhelmingly show most rapists are known to survivors. Much of assault happens in their own homes and workplaces. Many of the men who raped Gisele Pelicot were ‘ordinary men' - journalists, soldiers, nurses, supermarket workers - like many men you may know in your everyday life.

This exceptionalised manner of reporting helps create disbelief in survivors. Because rapists look like ordinary men, or are admired men, survivors are dismissed as exaggerators and hysterics, even liars. "It's not that bad, no kids were involved, nobody died" said the mayor of the Pelicots' home town-as Indian politicians so often do. Nadia el Bouroumi, a defence lawyer in the Pélicot trial, filmed herself dancing to ‘Wake me up before you go-go" as if to mock Ms. Pélicot's assertion that she wasn't pretending to be asleep, that she had no idea what was being done to her.

Since the RG Kar college rape and murder there has been a rash of predictable articles about how "India has rape culture." Though rooted in good intent, this form of civilizational diagnosis unthinkingly feeds into conversations about national culture and honour. Each society rushes to show it is culturally superior by denying the reality of gendered violence and silences survivor experiences to preserve national identity. A recent stuIn France #MeToo has been resisted because the French believe they are a sexually sophisticated culture and #MeToo is American puritanism. In India we rush to prove we are protectors of women, worshippers of devi. A recent study on ambivalent sexism found that the greater this belief in protectionism, the more the tolerance for spousal violence. If most rapists are known to the victim, what does that tolerance mean for justice?

Some of Ms Pelicot's rapists believed her husband's consent was all they needed. Perhaps most truthful was one Lionel R: " I didn't ask myself too many questions".

Why would he? The questions in sexual crimes are always for victims, who become accused of attracting violence which is to be unquestioningly expected. Gisele Pelicot's unflinching composure demands that for shame to change sides, the questions must too.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com