A poll in France has named Gisèle Pelicot as the country’s person of the year for the courage and dignity she displayed during the rape trial that transfixed the West in the autumn.
The Independent newspaper argued last week that the Frenchwoman deserves to be named the world’s Person of 2024 – not Donald Trump – and Prospect magazine agreed, saying Pelicot has ‘gifted others with hope for change’.
Gisèle Pelicot is certainly an inspirational woman, the word used by President Emmanuel Macron to describe her bravery in court as she sat through the three month trial that resulted in the imprisonment of her former husband and 51 men for rape and assault.
Over the course of ten years Dominique Pelicot had drugged his wife and then invited men he met online to violate her. The trial attracted journalists from around the world, including one from the New York Times who wrote that ‘Gisèle Pelicot’s image has become a symbol of female strength around the world’.
It wasn’t just Macron who hailed her incredible resilience; there were tributes from other world leaders, including the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Spain.
A minister in the British government said the trial had ‘made the world stand still with horror’, adding that ‘Gisèle Pelicot deserves every award that could possibly ever be given to her… but because I think her story is going to change the world.’
That minister was Jess Phillips, Labour’s minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls.
Last week it was revealed that Phillips had rejected requests for a Home Office-led inquiry into historic child abuse in Oldham. This, she explained, was because ‘it is for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene.’
A report in 2022 concluded that many girls had been abused in Oldham between 2011 and 2014 because of police and council incompetence. The report stated that those responsible were ‘predominantly Pakistani offenders across the country’ although it rejected the idea that this fact had influenced the authorities’ investigation.
The Pelicot case, appalling as it was, was an uncomplicated one for the western media. Gisèle’s husband was white, and so were most of men who raped her. There was no need for nuance or euphemisms to conceal the ethnicity of the perpetrators. Hard questions could be asked, like the one posed by the BBC: ‘What might it say about French men – some would say all men – that 50 of them… were apparently willing to accept a casual invitation to have sex with an unknown woman as she lay unconscious?’
The BBC appeared to imply that every French man was a potential rapist; would the broadcaster dare say something similar of British Pakistanis? Of course not, because the idea is preposterous.
Nonetheless, across England this century there have been a series of ‘grooming gang’ scandals: in Oldham, Rochdale, Rotherham, Huddersfield, Telford and Newcastle to name but a few, and British Pakistanis have been a common denominator.
In Rochdale one girl, ‘Ruby’ was raped more than 100 times from the age of 12. She described how she was raped by about 40 men in one night. ‘One would finish and then the other one would come in and it was just like that all night,’ she said in an interview last year.
Ruby spoke out last year shortly after the publication of a review into the Rochdale grooming gang, which found that young girls were ‘left at the mercy’ of the gangs for years because of police and local authority indifference.
In Ruby’s case there were no declarations of support from world leaders and no editorials in national newspapers praising her strength, courage and dignity for speaking out.
The failings of Rochdale were repeated in other places, including Newcastle where, in 2017 17 men were convicted of sexually abusing numerous females between the ages of 13 and 25. In response, Labour’s then shadow minister, Sarah Champion, wrote a column in the Sun newspaper in which she stated that ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.’ Her comments were similar to those of Jack Straw, the Home Secretary in Tony Blair’s first government, who drew attention to the phenomenon in 2011.
However, Champion’s article prompted an angry backlash from some within the Labour party, and she resigned with an apology for her ‘poor choice of words’. The leader of the Labour party at the time, Jeremy Corbyn, accepted Champion’s resignation and said Labour would not ‘demonise any particular group’.
There is a similar attitude among some on the French left. In 2016 it was revealed that 52 per cent of rapes were committed by foreigners, and in recent years there have been a series of brutal rapes and murders carried out by people in the country illegally. One victim was a young Parisien, Claire, raped in her apartment in 2023 by an African under a deportation order.
Claire has every inch the courage of Gisèle Pelicot. Since her ordeal, she has appeared on television to publicise her podcast and her support group for other women who have suffered sexual abuse. She has also been strident in her criticism of the government; if they had done its job and deported the man she wouldn’t have been raped. For that, some on the left have accused her of racism.
Jeremy Corbyn was one of the first politicians in Britain to react to the conviction of the men who had raped Gisèle Pelicot. Posting on X, Corbyn said the Frenchwoman ‘will forever be the face of dignity and resilience. Today, we stand with all survivors of sexual violence and against the systems that intimidate them into silence.’
‘All survivors?’ Or are some in the West rather selective about which victims of sexual violence they stand alongside?
Comments