There will always be monsters, but the silence, the carelessness, the lack of questioning, the decision not to get involved, the averted gaze are no less monstrous. Remember this when intimate images of a woman reach you in the WhatsApp group.
Three summers ago, traveling by car through Provence, we passed through the Vaucluse department. We passed through its beautiful cities, vineyards, lavender fields and turquoise lakes. It was impossible, impossible to think that at that moment, in that idyllic place, one of the most cruel, terrifying, evil and dehumanizing events we have ever known was taking place.
A 68-year-old retired father of three spent nine years drugging his wife of 50 years and propositioning her on internet forums for rape.
Unconscious, due to the substances that this subject provided her, the woman was raped by at least 72 men, many of them repeated up to six times, while the husband was in charge of recording everything audiovisually and saving it in a folder on his computer. called “abuse”. Her children, worried about the fainting spells she suffered and the strange pains she felt in her body, encouraged her to see a psychiatrist, thinking that she suffered some kind of neurological disease. It was the luck of having caught the aforementioned man placing a mobile phone in a supermarket to record under women’s skirts, which allowed the police to discover the facts. The trial is taking place these days.
It is difficult to describe the feeling that awakens in me when I hear the story of this atrocity. Other monsters like this one reside in our collective memory: the monster of Amstetten, the perpetrators of the crimes of Alcasser… Monsters, monsters that have frightened us since we were children, that awaken in our heads every time we walk alone in a dark street. Monsters that all share the same ideological basis: the dehumanization and objectification of women, their right to exercise violence against them for their own pleasure, the security that they are something that belongs to them and that they can and have the right to provide.
One might think that these are isolated cases, that these monsters are a rarity with which we are condemned to coexist on rare occasions. But I can’t help but think about what allows these monsters to act and above all, I can’t help but think about those 72 men who raped an unconscious woman.
They were firefighters, journalists, delivery drivers, civil servants, retirees, they were between 21 and 68 years old, they were husbands, grandparents, friends, boyfriends. One of the accused who sits in the dock today, a 55-year-old electrician, said: “It’s not rape because it was her husband who suggested it.” And I don’t think there is a more illuminating sentence for this whole issue.
When Hannah Arendt presented her idea of the banality of evil after the Eichmann trial, she highlighted how a lack of thought and critical judgment could normalize and support the commission of the worst crimes against humanity. Could the Nazi regime have been sustained without the complicity of all those who chose to look the other way? I see this same pattern of non-thought and behavior when I think of all those men, not only those who committed the rapes, but also all those who saw that gruesome message on the forum. “Unbeknownst to them,” he said. For nine years, no one reported him. What would be wrong with raping an unconscious woman if her husband allowed it? What is strange about that Internet ad? Did you ever hesitate?
The victim and her children refused to have the trial held behind closed doors. It is impressive to see her face in the press. “The shame must change sides,” the lawyer said.
There will always be monsters, but the silence, the carelessness, the lack of questioning, the decision not to get involved, the averted gaze are no less monstrous.
Remember this every time you receive intimate images of a woman from the WhatsApp group, humiliating jokes about their body, comments about what he would do to her and how he would do it to her, think about it when this week we saw the mayor of Vita on stage singing “I found a girl alone in the forest, I lifted her skirt, I pulled down her panties…” chanted with laughter by the audience during the municipal festivities.
Present the monster as something alien to our world and let all the fury fall on the women who denounce rape culture.
Shame has to change sides, shame is not wanting to see, shame is not stopping it.
