GISELE PELICOT AND FRANCA VIOLA: WHEN SHAME CHANGES SIDE
These last three months of 2024 have seen a trial that will re-write history in France and in Europe. Dominique Pelicot, 72-years old and retired, drugged his wife Gisele for a decade and contacted 72 strangers online to rape her while she was unconscious, filming every one of them. Given the possibility to carry the trial on behind closed doors, Gisele refused and decided to open the court hall to the press and the public. “Shame must change sides” she declared.
Gisele Pelicot reminds me of another trial that shaped history in my country, Italy. In 1965, Franca Viola, a Sicilian young woman, was kidnapped by her ex-fiancé to coerce her family into accepting their wedding. In 1965, rape wasn’t considered a crime against the person, but only against the morals: if the victim was unmarried and the rapist married her, every charge would automatically drop. Eloping together, or kidnapping the bride-to-be, was often used to force families to accept marriages, on the grounds that the union had already been consummated, and the girl’s honour had already been compromised. Franca Viola and her family refused reparatory marriage and brought her rapist to court. During the trial, Franca declared: “I am no one’s property, no one can force me to love a person I have no respect for, honour is lost by those who do such things, not by those who suffer them”.
Italy had to wait 15 more years before reparatory marriage was abolished and another 15 for rape to become a crime against the person, but Franca was the first woman to shift the blame and the shame from the victim to the abuser, shaking then-deeply Catholic Italy and paving the way for the battles to come. Today, almost 60 years after her trial, we are reminded once again that shame must indeed change sides.
Shame and honour are feelings connected to a person’s standing and reputation, to their worth in the eyes of their community. Unlike guilt, an internalised, more private emotion connected to our own ethics and morals, shame is a public emotion that assumes an observer. In patriarchal societies, upholding a good reputation is a matter of honour, and failure to do so brings shame to the individual and to their close relatives, putting the nuclear family on the forefront of enacting and ensuring the good reputation of its members. While honour is, in men, connected to the idea of masculinity and virility, female honour is usually centred on the woman’s chastity when unmarried, and fidelity when married. Women who lose their “virtue”, either willingly or unwillingly, are made to feel like they lost the only valuable thing about them and are shrouded in shame and dishonour.
Shame is still a reason, for many women, not to report their rapists and abusers, or to only do so years after the abuse. Not without reason: when a woman speaks up about the violence she suffered, every detail of her life is quickly scrutinised with the open goal to find her at fault, to prove she went looking for it. Even today, defense lawyers accused Gisele Pelicot of having secretly given her consent to being drugged unconscious and mass raped, just like, 60 years ago, lawyers accused Franca Viola of being in cahoots with her kidnapper.
Holding their heads up high, women like Gisele and Franca have refused to carry the shame for what has been done to them, and by doing so they have contributed to the history of female rights and female liberation in their countries and in all of Europe.
