Thousands of people gathered Saturday in several French cities to call for a new law against violence toward women that includes the notion of consent, a topic brought into sharp focus by the Gisèle Pelicot case. Pelicot was raped while unconscious by at least 51 defendants, including her former husband, a detail that has jolted public conversation about how consent is defined in law.
When this high-profile trial enters its final stretch, with final arguments expected next week before the verdict on December 20, more than 400 associations moved up World Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women by two days and organized protests across many French cities.
The Paris gathering was the largest. Protesters highlighted that in France a rape occurs every six minutes, that only about 0.5 percent of cases lead to a conviction, and that femicide takes place roughly every three days.
In addition, associations complained about insufficient funding to address gender-based violence in France and urged a comprehensive law modeled on Spain, which, for instance, has specialized courts for violence against women. The notion of sexual consent became a central banner of the marches as well.
Activist Sophie Truchot, a founder of Why the Feminism, told BFMTV that the case against the 51 accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot has underscored the need to enshrine consent in the legal framework.
One pretext cited by the defendants was the claim that they did not know whether Ms. Pelicot consented. While the argument appears weak given the evidence, it illustrates why it is so important to codify consent in the law.
A parliamentary commission of the French National Assembly is working until the end of the year to include consent within the definition of rape, which to date covers acts of “violence, coercion, threat or surprise” without explicitly mentioning consent.
Nevertheless, changing the current legal framework divides jurists, feminist associations, lawmakers, and judges. The Justice Minister Didier Migaud has expressed support for incorporating consent into the statute.
This notion has come to the fore since last September, when the Gisèle Pelicot rape trial began its final hearings in Avignon in the south of France. The acts under consideration occurred between 2011 and 2020, during which the septuagenarian woman was given large doses of anxiolytics by her then-husband, Dominique, without her knowledge, leaving her in a state of unconsciousness that prevented her from recalling what happened.
From the town of Mazan, where the couple resided, Dominique Pelicot contacted other men through an online platform dedicated to sexual encounters and invited them to his home to rape Gisèle. He recorded and photographed the assaults, documents that have become the principal evidence in the case.
During nearly three months of proceedings, which Gisèle requested be held publicly and which drew the presence of 165 media outlets, there were moving testimonies from the three Pelicot children and from the victim herself, who this week said that “the scar will never fully heal.” “I have lost ten years of my life that I will never recover,” Gisèle emphasized, now 72 years old.