The Defendants in France’s Rape Trial Are Telling Us Something Horrifying
VALENTINE FAURE
本月在法国马藏附近举行的抗议活动。生活在此地的多米尼克·佩利科承认在大约十年的时间里对妻子下药和强奸，并让陌生人参与强奸。Clement Mahoudeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s the case that has transfixed France. Prosecutors say that for almost a decade, Dominique Pelicot repeatedly drugged his wife and invited strangers to join him in raping her. The prosecutors say that dozens of men assaulted her as she lay unconscious and that her husband filmed most of the encounters and then filed the videos in digital folders, including one titled “abuse.”这起案件震惊了整个法国。检方指出，在近十年的时间里，多米尼克·佩利科多次对妻子下药，邀请陌生人一起强奸她。检察官表示，她在无意识状态下遭到数十名男子的侵犯，而她的丈夫将大部分经历拍了下来，并将这些视频存储在数字文件夹中，其中一个文件夹的标题是“虐待”。When Mr. Pelicot’s trial opened last month, his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, waived her right to anonymity and spoke with remarkable, withering poise. Shehas become France’sfeminist hero: Women at protests in Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux yell, “We’re all Gisèle.” Mr. Pelicot has pleaded guilty to all of the charges against him and has said, straightforwardly, “I am a rapist.”上个月对佩利科的庭审开始时，已经自愿放弃匿名权的妻子吉赛尔·佩利科以非凡、令人敬畏的姿态做了陈词。她成为了法国的女权主义英雄：在巴黎、马赛和波尔多的抗议活动中，女性高呼“我们都是吉赛尔”。佩利科对所有指控都表示认罪，并坦承“我是强奸犯”。But there are 50 other men in the dock with Mr. Pelicot. Most of them are charged with the aggravated rape of Ms. Pelicot. More than a dozen have pleaded not guilty; some have argued that they were tricked or were told that Ms. Pelicot was pretending to be asleep because she was shy.但与佩利科一起出庭受审的还有另外50名男子。其中大多数被控加重强奸罪。有十几名被告表示不认罪；一些人辩称，当时他们是被骗了，或者被告知佩利科女士是因为害羞而假装睡着。Feminism has long been interested in the relationship between knowledge and power, in how women deprived of knowledge are deprived of power. In the past few weeks, we have been brutally reminded that ignorance or the claiming of it can also be a convenient tool of the powerful. Consent requires an effort to know the desires of the other, while rape requires the complete disregard — the cancellation — of the other, of allowing oneself to have awareness of only one’s own pleasure. Indeed, drugging a woman into complete submission seems like a particularly obvious manifestation of a man’s desire not to know.女权主义长期以来关注知识与权力的关系，关注被剥夺知识的女性是如何被剥夺权力的。在过去几周里，我们惨痛地意识到，不知情或声称不知情也可以成为权势者的便利工具。获得同意需要有了解他人意愿的动作，而强奸则是对他人的完全无视——一种取消，只在乎自己的快感。事实上，下药让女人完全屈服似乎是男性无意了解对方意愿的一个特别明显的表现。“I don’t accept being called a rapist,” one defendant protested in court. “I’m not a rapist. It’s too much for me to bear,” he said. He went on to explain how much he’s learned about consent since his arrest: “The magistrate told me: Even if you’re married, a woman doesn’t fully belong to you.” “Maybe not at all,” the judge corrected, perfecting the defendant’s sexual education in court. “Yes, women don’t belong to men,” he replied. “I hope they’ll teach that in schools. It took me 54 years.”“我不接受自己被称为强奸犯，”一名被告在法庭上抗议道。“我不是强奸犯。我实在接受不了，”他说。他接着解释说，自被捕后，他学到了很多关于知情同意的知识：“执法官告诉我：即使你结婚了，一个女人也不完全属于你。”“也许完全不属于你，”法官纠正道，在公堂之上完善被告的性教育。“是的，女人不属于男人，”他回答说。“我希望他们能在学校里教这些。我用了54年的时间才明白。”One defendant said that he was “destroyed” when he learned what had happened. “I will never get over it,” he told Ms. Pelicot in court, as if she had been raped without the knowledge of either the perpetrator or the victim. Pressed, he described it as an “involuntary rape.”一名被告表示，在得知发生的事情后，他“崩溃”了。“我永远无法接受这个事实，”他在法庭上对佩利科女士说道，仿佛她是在施害和受害双方均不知情的情况下遭到了强奸。追问之下，他选择称之为“非自愿强奸”。Mr. Pelicot kept meticulous video evidence of most of the assaults, so the defendants cannot dispute the material facts. The only defense they have available is to say that they did not know that what they were doing was rape because they did not know that they did not have the consent of Ms. Pelicot. Some have argued that they went to the couple’s home to have filmed sex on the assumption that Ms. Pelicot waspretendingto be asleep but thought she was participating or that they understood that Mr. Pelicot could consent on her behalf as her husband. (“She’s his wife. He can do whatever he wants with her,” one defendant said.) One argued that he did not know what “consent” meant.佩利科详细记录了大部分性侵事件的视频证据，因此被告无法对关键事实提出异议。他们唯一可以辩护的地方，就是声称不知道他们所做的事情是强奸，因为他们不知道没有得到佩利科女士的同意。有些人辩称，他们去这对夫妇的家中拍摄性爱视频，是因为他们认为佩利科女士是假装睡着的，其实她是有参与其中的，或者他们认为佩利科作为她的丈夫可以代她同意。（“她是他的妻子。他可以对她做任何他想做的事，”一名被告说。）有一个被告辩称，他不知道“知情同意”是什么意思。A growing number of European Union countries have “yes means yes” sexual consent laws, but France still defines rape as a sexual act committed through “violence, coercion, threat or surprise.” This trial has reopened the debate about whether the definition should be changed. Without a requirement of affirmative consent, an accused person can argue — as one of the defense lawyers in this trial did — that “without intention to commit it, there is no rape.” The system insists that effort be expended to try to divine the true intentions of men who are accused of committing a sex act on a snoring woman.越来越多的欧盟国家制定了“同意就是同意”的性同意法，但法国仍然将强奸定义为通过“暴力、胁迫、威胁或出其不意”实施的性行为。这次审判重新点燃了是否应该改变强奸定义的辩论。在不要求得到肯定同意的情况下，被告可以辩称——就像这次审判中的一名辩护律师所做的那样——“如果没有实施强奸的意图，强奸就不成立。”现行法律坚持认为，对于那些被指控对昏睡状态下的女性实施性行为的男人，应该尽最大努力弄清楚他们的真实意图。A recent Ipsos survey revealed significant progress in the understanding of rape since the beginning of the #MeToo movement in France, but some one-fifth of French people still said they do not view forcing their partner to have intercourse as rape, and nearly 10 percent said that forcing sex on someone who is drunk or asleep or incapable of expressing consent is not rape. Among men ages 18 to 24, it’s closer to 30 percent. (“To me, rape is grabbing someone in the street,” one of the defendants is reported to have said.)益普索最近的一项调查显示，自法国的“#我也是”运动开始以来，人们对强奸的理解取得了重大进展，但大约五分之一的法国人仍然表示，他们不认为强迫伴侣发生性关系是强奸，近10%的人表示，强迫醉酒或睡着或无法表达知情同意的人发生性关系不是强奸。在18至24岁的男性中，这一比例接近30%。（“对我来说，强奸得是在街上把一个人拽走的程度，”据媒体报道，其中一名被告说。）It appears to have been easy for Mr. Pelicot to find men who were willing to participate in the abuse of his unconscious wife; many of the accused men lived within about 40 miles of his home. If their number makes them monstrous, taken one by one, they’re sadly normal. Men with families and jobs — a journalist, a firefighter, a nurse, a civil servant. One apparently missed the birth of his daughter while he was at the Pelicot home. According to reporting by Le Monde, 72 of the 83 men Mr. Pelicot approached on the internet forum À Son Insu (Without Her Knowledge) or on Skype said yes. Of the minority who declined, it doesn’t seem that any of them bothered to call the police. Presumably they also did not want to know.对佩利科来说，似乎很容易就找到了愿意参与性侵的男人；许多被告都住在距离他家65公里范围内。如果说他们的数量之多让人觉得骇人听闻，那么可悲的是，一个个来看，他们都是普通人。他们有家庭、有工作，其中包括记者、消防员、护士、公务员。其中一人在佩利科家时错过了自己女儿的出生。据《世界报》报道，佩利科透过网络论坛À Son Insu（意为“瞒着她”）或Skype接触的83名男性中，有72人表示愿意参与。在拒绝的少数人中，似乎没有人费心报警。想必他们并不想知道太多。
