No moral high ground on sexual violence: The lesson from Gisele Pelicot’s rape trial, Epstein files

“Without her knowledge”. This was the name of the chatroom on the website Coco.fr where men of all ages – from 22 to 70 – signed up to rape Gisele Pelicot while she was drugged unconscious. This grotesque, monstrous theatre was engineered by her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot.

In a piercing, moving but remarkably poised interview to The New York Times, she outlines her trauma. She decided to go public and reveal her identity because the world would never see the faces of the perpetrators: “regular” men, like her husband, whom women interact with every day. Pelicot’s decision to go public revealed that many more men are capable of horrific violence against women, but refuse to acknowledge their acts as violent, or even to see themselves as capable of violence.

This sordid saga could be viewed as an unusually terrible episode showcasing the depths to which a few sick minds can fall, had it not coincided with the unmasking of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s vast network. The US Department of Justice has six million pages of evidence, of which some three million have been released, containing 180,000 images and 2,000 videos.

Epstein, along with his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, ran a massive sex ring for decades involving minor girls – the media keeps referring to them as “underage women” to blunt the edge of the horror. The world’s most powerful men – and some women – from politics, business, finance and academia were either directly complicit in, or chose to ignore this ghastly reality, even after Epstein’s conviction, because of considerations of personal gain.

Gisele Pelicot’s rape was without her knowledge. Epstein’s collaborators participated in sexual violence with full knowledge. His supporters chose to ignore wrongdoing, even after his conviction in 2008. In both starkly contrasting episodes, women’s bodies were treated as objects for male consumption, their autonomy irrelevant. Both incidents also took place in the world’s richest countries.

The Epstein affair involved the willing participation of rich and powerful men – leaders of countries, institutions, and organisations whose decisions affect millions of lives globally. This included academic icons like Noam Chomsky, who continued his association with Epstein even after was convicted – a cruel irony, given that Chomsky’s work influenced generations to be alert to global atrocities, yet he found it easy to turn a blind eye to violence against women.

These incidents have evoked massive waves of solidarity from women across the globe, demonstrating that experiences of violence, perpetrated by men known to the victims, are ubiquitous, cutting across national and cultural boundaries. Despite the overwhelming evidence of the crimes, there are denials or a tendency to minimise suffering and silence victims.

For most victims of sexual violence, there are no witnesses and no documentation, which makes it easier to disbelieve them. Gisele Pelicot mentions how her husband had a troubled childhood involving sexual abuse. She does not use this fact to excuse his violence but simply mentions it.

Research consistently confirms this intergenerational transmission of violence. This raises the question: to what extent does childhood sexual abuse experienced by women lead them to become perpetrators? There is some intergenerational transmission for women too – Ghislaine Maxwell’s own story of emotional neglect and physical and mental abuse at the hands of her father, if accurate, could be testament to that, but for a large majority of women, the experience of violence is largely internalised as personal shame, rather than directed towards others.

It is pertinent to ask how this is enabled by a patriarchal social organisation that allows violence against women as an expression of power and control. Patriarchal structures produce the conditions under which violence thrives – through legal impunity, institutional silence, and social norms that treat women’s subjugation as natural. Rather than extreme aberrations, the Pelicot and Epstein cases are the logical endpoints of systems that grant men unchecked power over women’s bodies.

These episodes reveal the universality of patriarchal violence, including in White-majority, wealthy nations. Global statistics on intimate partner violence and domestic violence confirm that neither wealth nor a White-majority population is negatively correlated with intimate partner violence and domestic violence. These figures are almost certainly undercounts everywhere, since violence is perpetrated by someone known to the victim.

This is a particularly critical point because in academic and policy circles, cultural explanations for gender abound, leading commentators in the developed world to believe that real patriarchy lies elsewhere: in the developing world, with its regressive gender norms. The most dangerous countries for women are identified as those in the Global South. However, many of these indices include violence from war or internal strife, which is undoubtedly higher in less developed regions. Focusing on intimate partner violence in the wealthy Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries is a sobering reality check: an average of 21% of women report such incidents at least once in their lifetimes. That is one in five women in the richest countries of the world.

There is a famous proverb in Hindi which goes “iss hamam mein sab nangey hain”, literally “everybody is naked in the bathhouse”, which means, in this case, that nobody holds the moral high ground on the grisly issue of violence against women. Many gender gaps are indeed lower in richer countries: in years and quality of education, for instance. Economic growth seems to alleviate certain dimensions of gender inequality. However, some problems, intimate partner violence being a crucial one, are immune to national or individual wealth. No amount of GDP growth has proven sufficient to protect women from violence in their own homes, at the hands of men they know and trust.

This is the sobering reminder for International Women’s Day: that the fight against gender-based violence cannot be outsourced to development alone. It demands a fundamental reckoning with the structures of power that enable it – across every country, income level, and community. Gisele Pelicot chose to make her suffering public so that “shame changes sides.”

Until we stop locating the problem of violence against women in culture, poverty, or underdevelopment – conveniently placing it elsewhere – and confront it as a feature of patriarchal social organisation that is universal, we will continue to look in the wrong places and find the wrong solutions.

Ashwini Deshpande is Head and Professor, Department of Economics and Founding Director, Centre of Economic Data and Analysis at Ashoka University.