Thursday, 19 December 2024

Gisèle - An Acclamation

 



France is a different country, they do things differently there. You can tell a lot about a country from how it addresses allegations of sexual offending. If you were to look at England you would see a country that takes months, sometimes even years to bring sexual allegations to trial. You might think that suggests England does not attach much priority to investigating, prosecuting and trying serious sexual offending. You would be right to think that; whatever empty assurances politicians offer to the contrary. 

Something the very different French and English criminal trial processes have in common is an automatic right to anonymity for complainants. If Gisèle Pelicot had not waived that right there is a very real possibility that you and I would never have heard of her case and the appalling offences done to her.

Sexual offending within families can be extremely difficult to report because of what is known as jigsaw identification: establishing the identity of the victim because the defendant’s name and crimes are known. It would have been almost impossible to report Gisèle’s case without her identity being discerned. 

That meant she was confronted with a terrible decision. Endure a trial lasting weeks under a veil of secrecy protecting her but at the same time concealing from France and the world the enormity of what her husband and so many other men, known and unknown, had done to her. Or subject herself to international scrutiny and the exposition of intimate indignities of the most terrible kind. 

The public gaze is an unpredictable thing and rarely noted for its compassion. But the courageous decision she made could not have been more fully vindicated. The world looked on and the world was appalled. But even more importantly than that the world was educated. There endures a disconnect between the perception of what sexual offending is so often thought to be, shortly summarised as stranger danger, and what is so often the devastating reality, that it is the men in whom the most trust is reposed who far too frequently do the most to abuse that trust. 

Pelicot and his accomplices committed their crimes in darkness assuming their actions would remain shrouded and concealed. But for Gisèle’s courage and heroism they would have been safe in that assumption. Instead, the shame they sought to foist on her without regard for her humanity and bodily integrity has well and truly changed sides. Their exploitation of her stupefied powerlessness has metamorphosed into countless millions standing figuratively by her side and many literally doing so as she has walked through the fire of a public trial and emerged a figurehead of dignity undimmed and undespoiled. 

Any man who has followed this case without engaging in serious soul searching most likely cleaves to the empty and disingenuous cliché: not all men. Of course not all men but what Pelicot and his ‘regular guy’ accomplices have shown is that it can be any man. This is a man problem and not one for Gisèle or any woman to solve. Gisèle means pledge and by standing up for herself her example will, I hope, act as a promise to victims everywhere that bad deeds brought to light bring shame only to perpetrators.

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