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

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.

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