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Content warning: This post discusses sexual assault.
I wanted to write a happy post to wrap up 2024. But then I saw the news about the Pelicot verdict.
Today a court in France found the 51 men who raped Gisèle Pelicot guilty. Some of these men will not serve any additional prison time. Pelicot’s husband, who drugged his wife repeatedly during a decade of abuse, arranged for strangers to rape her while he watched, and recorded the assaults in photographs and videos, received the maximum sentence: twenty years.
Twenty years.
She was asleep in her own bed, in her home, when the men assaulted her.
I have been stuck on that number, twenty. It feels much too short. It feels like a joke. 51 men. 20 years.
It is better than the jail sentence that a judge in California gave to Brock Turner, a Stanford student who raped an unconscious woman in a dumpster in 2015 and faced a possible 14 year prison sentence. Don’t let “20 minutes of action,” Turner’s father pleaded, derail a promising future. Turner, a competitive swimmer, had so much ahead of him, the judge agreed, it would be a pity to let one mistake have a “severe impact” on the rest of his life. So he handed down a six-month jail sentence. (Voters subsequently recalled that judge.)
The survivor of Turner’s violence, Chanel Miller, read her victim impact statement aloud in court at the sentencing hearing:
“You have dragged me through this hell with you, dipped me back into that night again and again… You knocked down both our towers. I collapsed at the same time you did. Your damage was concrete, stripped of titles, degrees, enrollment. My damage was internal, unseen. I carry it with me.”
You have dragged me through this hell with you.
In February 2019 I read an opinion essay in the New York Times by Sharma Shields that has stayed with me more than anything else I’ve ever read in that paper. Shields wrote about the Book of Greek Myths by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, a classic collection that I’d also read and loved as a child, which describes one story after another in which a god abducted or harmed a woman:
“While reading my favorite book, I wondered about the word ‘rape,’ as in the Rape of Persephone. I lingered over the illustration of her descent into the yawning pit, Hades’ arm securing her to the chariot. Above, in a blue dress, searching and despairing, was the faint figure of Demeter, the woebegone mother. I thought I understood what rape meant: When someone does something unwanted.”
Persephone to Hades: You have dragged me through this hell with you.
Demeter was the goddess of the harvest, but her grief over Persephone brings winter’s cold and barren fields. It is only when Hades permits his stolen bride to rejoin her mother for temporary visits that the earth blooms again.
As a child, Shields was drawn to stories of Artemis, who refused to marry. “The book calls her ‘a cold and pitiless goddess,’” Shields writes, “but to me she was self-assured, unapologetically powerful.” Having survived a sexual assault by a boyfriend when she was 15, and now a parent to two young children, Shields wanted to teach them to imagine a different world, one with consequences for the perpetrators. Her essay’s final paragraph left me shaking:
“What will it take for us to toss the water onto the rapists’ heads, to watch assured as they flee, the blood-mouthed hounds — guilt, say, or responsibility — snapping behind them? It is not the violence of such a scene that attracts me, but the righteousness. Artemis was a cold and pitiless goddess. She knew — or learned — where to place the blame.”
A few weeks ago, Nancy Mace (R-SC) introduced a bill to ban Sarah McBride (D-Del.), the first transgender person elected to the U.S. Congress, from women’s restrooms on the Hill. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) subsequently announced a new House rule stipulating that only people “of that biological sex” could use single-sex bathrooms in the Capitol or in House office buildings. Mace defended the measure as a feminist effort to protect women from assault, as if she were Persephone’s advocate:
“I’m a victim of abuse myself, I’m a rape survivor. I have PTSD from the abuse I’ve suffered at the hands of a man and I know how vulnerable women and girls are in private spaces. So I’m absolutely, 100 percent gonna stand in the way of any man that wants to be in a woman’s restroom, in our locker rooms, in our changing rooms.”
In her New York Times essay, Shields describes Demeter reaching out in vain as Hades drags her daughter away. Mace wants to assume the role of national Demeter, grasping for the innocents thrust in harm’s way. But trans-inclusive restroom policies have not led to a rise in assaults against ciswomen. Instead, they protect transwomen from the dangers of using the men’s restroom. According to the Williams Institute at UCLA, “transgender people are four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victims of violent crime.” (Emphasis added.) Mace is instead more like Apate, the goddess of deception, released from Pandora’s box to leave mortals unable to tell the difference between truth and lies.
You have dragged me through this hell with you.
We need better stories. Ones in which an abuser’s story is not the narrative arc. I am exhausted by television shows that rely on rape as a way to advance female characters’ story lines, as if nothing else of substance ever happens to women. We need stories about people who survive things, like a woman grossly abused by 51 men who nevertheless demanded that newspapers publish her name and who testified in court, unafraid and unashamed. Stories about justice and repentance. Stories about what it means to stand over the gaping pits of hell and see suffering and reach until your arms ache, until, finally, your daughter returns to you, whole, and it is spring again.