Breathe
By Luciana Wainer
This Thursday, Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to twenty years in prison for raping, drugging and videotaping his wife during the assaults she suffered for eleven years. This sentence comes after four months of trial, dozens of heartbreaking testimonies, irrefutable documentary evidence that demonstrated the most brutal face of sexual violence against women; the one that comes from the closest person, the one who hurts at night and accompanies her to the doctor's office in the mornings. But, in addition to the above, this sentence came thanks to another woman who, in September 2020, decided to denounce an old man who recorded under her skirt in a grocery store in Carpentras and a security guard who alerted the woman, accompanied the complaint and detained Dominique Pelicot until the police arrived. The unveiling of the videos, the assaults and the chemical submission came later. In other words, the horror of the predator Dominique Pelicot and the other fifty rapists could not have reached the courts had it not been for that prior complaint, which brought to the authorities what many would have considered a misdemeanor.
How many times are we omissive and condescending in the face of these "misdemeanors"?
How many police officers or Public Ministry agents have convinced us that it is not worth it to report touching in public transportation, verbal harassment in the street or sexual harassment in social networks? In my own biography, I can remember at least three of them, where bureaucracy took precedence over anger and injustice. In one of those cases, I received a call several months later with an invitation to join in a collective complaint, since my aggressor -Oh, surprise!-, had bothered, harassed or annoyed more women.
Claudia de la Garza and Eréndira Derbez describe part of this problem in the book No son micro. Machismos cotidianos (Grijalbo, 2020), where they explain that common behaviors that reinforce the dominant position of men over women are often catalogued as micromachismos, thus excluding the frequency and constancy with which they occur. Something similar could be said of "petty crimes", which are neither so minor nor, for that reason, less criminal.
It is true that male violence has different levels. A man who kills and rapes is not the same as a man who sends insistent messages through social networks. It is not the same for a man to yell at you in the street, as it is for him to chase you and attack you around the corner. And, of course, not every act of street harassment involves a history of systematic and sustained sexual abuse. What is also true, however, is that violence tends to escalate and that a man who assaults is likely to do so again. What's more; he may have done it before. If we add to this the social revictimization, the inability of the authorities to act, the lack of training and the high levels of impunity in the country, the combo is devastating: according to figures from the Executive Secretariat of Public Security, complaints for family violence have gone from 127 thousand 424 in 2015 to 284 thousand 140 in 2023. Those of sexual violence, from 31,408 in 2015 to 89,253 cases in 2023. And the National Survey of Victimization and Perception of Public Safety estimates that only ten out of every one hundred cases are reported.
Gisèle Pelicot's bravery has left us with countless lessons that have been immortalized in her phrases, her actions and her admirable fortitude to achieve, with unprecedented forcefulness, that shame, indeed, changes sides. But he also leaves us with work to do: it is time to talk about how we deal with "petty crime"; it is imperative to stop normalizing violence.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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