Why France’s mass rape trial should trouble our consciences too
If the Pelicot scandal does signal a turning point for France, it should also serve to remind us here in Britain that we have nothing to be smug about.
Gisèle Pelicot, the French grandmother at the centre of the Avignon mass rape trial, has become a global feminist hero, an icon of female protest against male violence, shifting shame, as she put it, from victim to perpetrator.
For waiving her right to anonymity, publicly braving the horrors she endured, and facing her husband, who has admitted rape, and the 50 men accused alongside him, she has been hailed as the woman who could upend French patriarchy.
In France, thousands of women and men have marched in solidarity with Madame Pelicot, drugged by her husband for ten years so he could invite strangers into her bed to abuse her yet still finding the courage to testify in court.
The case has belatedly prompted a bout of national soul-searching in a country where traditional codes of masculinity set it apart from much of Europe.