In a 1983 speech to a pro-feminist men’s group, Andrea Dworkin noted that men’s experience of trauma did not justify their abuse of women and children. On the contrary, she argued, male dominance — bound up in men’s fear of other men, and a need to feel superior to others — perpetuated the violence that men themselves endured: 

The things the men’s movement has wanted are things worth having. Intimacy is worth having. Tenderness is worth having. Cooperation is worth having. A real emotional life is worth having. But you can’t have them in a world with rape.

I’ve been thinking of this speech in relation to the fifty-one men accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot. Many of them, we have been learning, had an awful start in life. According to Dominique Pelicot’s defence lawyer, the man who drugged his wife so other men could abuse her “has a split personality caused by the effect of childhood trauma”. One accused claims to have had “a violent childhood at the hands of his alcoholic father”, while another told the court “he had been sexually abused at the age of 12 to 13 by the president of the pétanque club in his village”. Still another reports being “the victim of sexual abuse within his family” while one tells of being “sexually abused by his father from the age of two, then placed in different foster families where he faced further violence and sexual abuse”. There are plenty of other such stories, all of them truly appalling. And yet — what relevance do they have to the choices these men made to become abusers themselves? 

It’s not that I don’t feel pity. If anything, it’s that I do. I can’t read these things and not feel incredibly sad for the boys these men were. There’s a part of me that would quite like to say “who cares, all of my compassion is for the woman you’re on trial for abusing”, only that wouldn’t be a natural response. It would diminish the reader or listener to have to switch off their capacity for empathy in such a way. That is the position in which these accounts place us, and it isn’t a fair one at all. 

… all our compassion ought to be directed towards their victim

Clearly, it was possible for the accused men themselves — so many of them — to feel nothing at all for Gisèle Pelicot. The guilty — and several have already admitted guilt — enjoyed treating her as nothing. That’s what makes the use of their own trauma stories as part of their defence so horribly unjust. If you’re not as monstrous as them, then you have to feel for the children and young men they once were. It is right and important that we remain able to do so. Yet why must we feel it now, when all our compassion ought to be directed towards their victim? How dare these men, in an effort to defend the indefensible, decide this is the time and place to reveal their own pain?  

It is never easy to talk about past experiences of sexual abuse. Still, it is worth remembering that this does not apply only to men. Most victims are girls and much of the work done to support survivors and end the taboo on disclosure has been led by feminists. Part of this has involved looking at the role of pornography and changing the conversation around consent. Many men — even those who have suffered abuse themselves — have not thanked feminists for this work. On the contrary, as has been the case with the feminist critique of male violence, feminists have found themselves doubly vilified: first, for questioning the cultural attitudes which perpetuate harm, and second, for not allowing men their violence, their porn, their abuse of our bodies, on the basis that men have been victims of other men, too.  

To pity these men does not make less of us, but their pain does not justify anything

Rather than join those who seek to end abuse, the men in the Pelicot trial threw their lot in with the very structures and hierarchies which lead to more of it. They actively participated in it, then had the nerve to complain about their victimhood only once they were on trial for hurting someone else. One can say “perhaps they’d never have told anyone otherwise”, but that’s true of so many victims, most of whom get through life without harming anyone else. Some women who are rape victims have also been victims of childhood sexual abuse, but to raise that in a rape trial, far from attracting sympathy, could risk damaging their credibility. Only the accused gets to weaponise his trauma here. 

One of the tremendous achievements of Gisèle Pelicot, making her a hero for so many of us, has been her stated desire to turn the shame back on the perpetrators of sexual assault: 

I want all women who have been raped to say: Madame Pelicot did it, I can too. I don’t want to be ashamed any longer.

Imagine if these men had chosen to respond to their own experiences of abuse in a similar way. Most people can’t — it’s what makes Pelicot so remarkable — but there are other choices. None of the support networks and political analyses that exist for survivors of sexual abuse were handed to them on a plate. They were created from scratch, by people who didn’t want others to suffer the way they had. 

The Pelicot accused did the opposite, even now showing little understanding of what other victims feel. But as Dworkin put it, “you’ve got to stop”:

How much you hurt doesn’t matter in the end any more than how much we hurt matters … If you have a conception of freedom that includes the existence of rape, you are wrong.

To pity these men does not make less of us, but their pain does not justify anything. They could have been better humans. It’s important, for others, that we believe this still.