Suzanne Harrington: Rape is absence of consent — how can this be so difficult to understand?

Gisele Pelicot should be awarded the Nobel Prize for Guts

Gisele Pelicot leaves the courthouse for a break during the appeals trial in the case of a man challenging his conviction, less than a year after the landmark verdict in a drugging and rape trial that shook France Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025 in Nimes, southern France. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly)

It’s hard to imagine as you pootle through the sunlit idyll of Provence – from the riverside antique markets of Isle de la Sorge, north towards the ancient cobbles of Carpentras – that this is where Dominique Pelicot was caught. 

In a Carpentras supermarket, a rancid old schoolboy filming women non-consensually. Upskirting, as the tabloids call it.

Unimaginable that it was around here he recruited at least 71 men to come to his home in Mazan, a picturesque commune (population 6,395), to rape his drugged wife.

Ordinary men. Local men. All ages, all backgrounds. All ready and willing to rape an unconscious woman. Over and over and over again.

Feminist philosopher Manon Garcia, in her book Living With Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial, wonders “if a single man in a small town like Mazan can manage to find at least seventy others [within a 50km radius], then how many men are there in France who would be prepared to rape an unconscious woman if the opportunity arose?” 

She asks, “Could it be that the average guy-next-door would willingly rape his neighbour’s sleeping wife if given the chance?”

Are these men pretending not to understand what rape means? What consent means? 

Gisele Pelicot – who should be awarded the Nobel Prize for Guts – was called an “accomplice”. 

One of the rapists, who appealed his sentence, described the rape footage (filmed by Mme Pelicot’s ex-husband) shown in court as “sex scenes”, while denying he is a rapist. Saying he cannot bear to be known as a rapist. Boo hoo.

Mme Pelicot, back in court and having to sit through the horror of watching her unconscious self being raped – again - addressed the man directly: “You haven’t understood. When are you going to recognise you raped me? It’s a crime to rape an unconscious woman. When did I ever give you consent? Never.”

At the original trial in 2024, which resulted in 51 men being jailed, a defence lawyer, Guillaume de Palma, opened by suggesting Mme Pelicot had not suffered ‘real’ rape: “There is rape and then there is rape,” he said.

Perhaps he was suggesting that it’s not rape unless you are violently assaulted by a knife-wielding psychopath down a dark alley. Not by your husband of fifty years, and a bunch of randoms from the internet.

“The Mazan rape trial was a trial about consent,” writes Manon Garcia. Under French law, rape is defined as “an act of sexual penetration of any kind…by means of violence, constraint, threat or surprise.” This is so outdated. 

Rape is absence of consent. You don’t need violence, threats, being jumped on, tied down – you just need to not want to, and for the other person to carry on when you don’t want to. This is rape. How can this be so difficult to understand?

In 1974, two Belgian women were raped by three men in the Calanques, near Marseilles. Like Mme Pelicot, the two women declined a private trial; instead, they hired a lawyer who got the case tried as a serious crime, rather than a misdemeanour. 

Until then, in France, rape was not classified as a serious crime – more a slap-on-the-wrist, like shoplifting or speeding. That trial was a turning point, like the Pelicot trial fifty years later.

“A real relation is one of reciprocity,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. “It is the mutual recognition of free beings who confirm one another.”

But when one being cannot see the humanity of the other – as these guys-next-door rapists could not see the humanity of Gisele Pelicot – then nobody is free.

Dehumanisation imprisons us all.