‘It takes a village to rape a woman.’ Community, modernity, and Gisèle Pelicot
by Alison Phipps
Green square with the words ‘Alison on it taking a village’ in light green text with some graphic design in pink.
In 2021, Rebecca Solnit said: ‘it takes a village to rape a woman’. She was talking about Harvey Weinstein. She meant this metaphorically - for every ‘bad man’ there are myriad others, of all genders, who enable him or at least agree to look away.
In 2020 however, the role of the village had been made flesh when Gisèle Pelicot realised her husband Dominique had covertly drugged and raped her on many occasions during the previous decade. Dominique had also used web forum à son insu (without her knowledge) to invite over 70 men, many of them local, to rape Gisèle while she was unconscious. Most of this happened in the couple's home, in the picturesque French village of Mazan.
At the foot of Mont Ventoux, 5 kilometers from Carpentras, the small town of Mazan has many vineyards and orchards. It is also the land of truffles. It benefits from an interesting historical heritage and its surroundings are full of paths that invite you to discover this countryside so typical of Provence.
‘It takes a village to rape a woman’ is a play on the proverb ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. The proverb indicates that modern individualised social reproduction isn’t fit for purpose, by implicitly comparing it to the collective organisation of both historical and contemporary non-capitalist societies.
‘It takes a village to rape a woman’, however, makes a different claim. First, it suggests that collectivities can be dangerous - and the Pelicot case, as well as the copious evidence of sexual abuse in families, churches, the army, schools, universities, and parliaments, confirms this. Secondly and on a deeper level, ‘it takes a village to rape a woman’ hints at something traditional and even natural in the conspiracy of silence around sexual violence. I don’t believe that.
Patriarchy dates back to Antiquity, if not even further. There’s also prehistoric evidence of violence against bodies that would now be defined as female, some of it potentially sexual. But sexual violence isn’t widespread and systematic at all times and in all places.
Globalised sexual violence has a whiff of modernity about it. It was racial capitalist intervention in the ‘village world’ (whether Indigenous or Mediaeval) that ushered in our current economically and sexually predatory world system. Modern colonialism relied heavily on sexual violence as one of its terror techniques. The transition to capitalism in Europe was achieved through brutal violence against women. These developments also marked a shift towards societies in which sexual violence became more frequent, normalised, and accepted.
A walk in the heart of the city, accessible by the monumental gates, allows you to discover its treasures. Mazan has retained part of its 12th and 14th-century ramparts. The cemetery is also a place of interest: it is surrounded by stone sarcophagi from the 6th and 7th centuries, which once lined the ancient Carpentras-Mormoiron road. The Chapel of the White Penitents, from the 17th century, houses a folk museum presenting the various aspects of traditional rural life of yesteryear.
It’s important not to romanticise pre-capitalist and pre-colonial societies as free of violence. However, there’s evidence that racial capitalism introduced sexual violence into populations where it wasn’t everyday or pervasive. How did this happen?
First, colonialism imposed a complex interaction between gender and race. Indigenous men were locally elevated through the imposition of patriarchy, and generally emasculated through the imposition of white supremacy. This was the ideal recipe for increased misogyny and sexual violence amongst colonised populations, which itself gave grist to the idea of the sexually violent ‘savage’.
While colonialism was sexually brutalising populations and rendering them as sexual threats, bourgeois gender was enforced in Europe through the Early Modern witch hunts. This campaign of sexualised torture destroyed the power of Mediaeval women, to remake gender relations for the purposes of racial capitalist production.
Over two centuries of terror, the witch hunts fired three key building blocks of capitalism. First, a structural separation of production and reproduction, with women solely responsible for the latter. Secondly, a defeated and passive model of femininity that naturalised gender oppression. Thirdly, rampant cultural misogyny that facilitated divide and rule. And just like in the colonies, the imposition of capitalism in Europe marked a shift from more restrained patriarchal power overseen and regulated by communities to absolute patriarchal power as Man’s household became his kingdom.
Like patriarchy, domestic violence (which is often sexual) predates racial capitalism. But when the village gave way to the metropole, domestic patriarchy was concealed and protected in a privatised family unit. Patriarchal violence also intensified through ideologies of binary gender and dyadic, possessive love. ‘I loved her, so I had to kill her’, as the apocryphal saying goes.
Mediaeval men had been expected to govern ‘properly ordered’ households where violence was only used when necessary. Domestic violence was seen as an abuse of power - and if it happened, the community would often intervene. When racial capitalism separated public from private, it tore a hole in this safety net. The racial capitalist nuclear family could be (and is) horrifically, interminably violent.
These historical facts challenge the idea of sexual violence as intrinsic to kinship and group dynamics. We can also see that modern racial capitalist institutions, corporations and enclaves are not functioning communities. Harvey Weinstein accumulated immense power in an ostentatious and cut-throat industry; the individuals around him were venal and/or scared. And although Gisèle Pelicot’s village of Mazan trades on its Mediaeval heritage, when the shutters are closed contemporary villages may be more alienated than connected.
In the community of 6,400 people in Mazan, which includes those who commute to the city of Avignon for work or retire from Paris, the Pelicots were not well known and were not active in local associations. Dominique Pelicot was sometimes seen riding his bike at weekends, occasionally with a little dog in the basket, and sometimes played the ballgame pétanque, but generally kept to himself.
Gisèle Pelicot did not know the alleged rapists identified by police. She told court she had recognised only one of them, a man who had come to discuss cycling with her husband at their home in Mazan. “I saw him now and then in the bakery; I would say hello. I never thought he’d come and rape me,” she said. It later emerged that one of the alleged rapists had worked at a supermarket in Carpentras. Others had been invited by Pelicot to come and observe his wife while doing the weekly shop to see if they found her attractive.
In atomised, alienated, or even adversarial capitalist communities, people are likely to look away. And if you refuse to look away, you often find yourself dispossessed of the capacities and resources for community intervention. This is because racial capitalism both privatised sexual violence and privatised the way we deal with it. As community accountability dissipated, we became clients of the system. Because of this, ‘not looking away’ in modernity usually means reporting a crime to the proper authorities.
In 2020, the same year the abuse of Gisèle Pelicot came to light, a woman was raped in broad daylight on a Piccadilly Line tube train in London. She’d fallen asleep and missed her stop. This occurred in front of a horrified French tourist, who didn’t intervene. Afterwards, though, he called the police; he also later returned to the UK, to give evidence in the court case.
With no judgment towards the man concerned, who was with his 11-year-old son when the rape occurred, this case is a good allegory for how we all deal with sexual harm. We are less likely to intervene, than to report an incident after the fact. This happens across the spectrum, from the most violent rapes, through street harassment, into universities and other institutions: at the ‘everyday’ end, complaints tend to be submitted when difficult conversations would be more effective. Faith (or hope) in authoritarian systems seems unshakeable, even given overwhelming evidence they don’t keep us safe: this is because clientelism and alienation are two sides of the same coin.
Dominique Pelicot and many of his accomplices had previously come to police attention, and some had prior convictions for violence against women. They included a prison warden and former police officer, a soldier and three former soldiers, a firefighter, and a nurse. They were nevertheless able to assemble via mutual rape fantasies, on hyper-modern digital real estate owned by technofeudal lords who get rich from online abuse.
For Gisèle Pelicot, monetised networked misogyny collided with bourgeois privacy, gendered property relations (some of her assailants claimed to believe her husband’s consent was enough), police inaction and neighbourhood myopia, to create a nightmare. The nightmare was visited upon her in the Mediaeval-esque territory of Mazan, and dreamed up in a hamlet in cyberspace.
These two spaces might seem very different. But their interaction in the Pelicot case suggests they’re both sites of late capitalist alienation. While it takes a village to rape a woman - or maybe more than one - this is not about what comes naturally, but about the ambivalence and toxic alliances that result from modern socioeconomic relations. As we try to put an end to sexual violence, it’s important to start here.
Wine lovers can stop at the Domaine de Fondrèche to visit the vineyard and the cellar. Finally, the herb market on Monday morning and that of producers, every Saturday morning from April to October, invite you to discover local products.
’The absolute horror of it,’ said a retired teacher, 76, who was born in Mazan to a family of cherry farmers and who had taught at the local school. ‘How could so many people have been involved without anyone knowing it was happening?
Italicised quotes are from this Guardian article by Angelique Chrisafis and from provenceholidays.com.
Alison Phipps is Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York. Her latest book Me, Not You: the trouble with mainstream feminism was published in 2020 by Manchester University Press. This blog draws on material from her new book Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism, out later this year from Manchester University Press.