Content Warning: This article touches on the topic of sexual assault which may be triggering for some readers.
When Gisèle Pelicot said “shame must change sides”, she struck on something that has occupied my thoughts day in, day out for most of my adult life.
It is this: Crimes involving violence against women, and particularly those involving sexual violence, do something more than violate a woman’s safety and dignity.
They inject her with a burning shame that does not belong to her.
As someone who has lived with this feeling my whole life, let me tell you, carrying shame that is not yours to carry is incredibly confusing.
It is harmful. It is heavy. It weighs us down and it keeps us silent and small and scared.
Yet Gisèle – a 72-year-old woman from regional France – used her power and her platform to show that perhaps we can shift the narrative back.
Perhaps we can force the perpetrators of violence against women to carry their own shame and accept accountability for their own shameful acts.
For those who don’t know, Gisèle was routinely drugged and raped by her husband, Dominique Pelicot, over a nine-year period.
He raped her while she was unconscious and invited at least 83 other men, most of whom he found via a website, to come over and do the same.
The abuse went undetected for many years.
Gisèle had memory blanks for whole periods of time due to the drugs.
But in 2020, when her husband was arrested for taking photographs up women’s skirts, police found images of Gisèle being raped by dozens of men in the couple’s home.
When her husband and his accomplices were charged and she was staring down a trial against 51 men who had sexually abused her, Gisèle had the right to a closed court and anonymity.
She chose to waive that right, at great personal risk. She chose to tell the world who she was and that she was not ashamed.
When Gisèle said those words – that “shame must change sides” – she gave voice to something so many have felt but which is so difficult to articulate: That in these kinds of crimes, unlike any others, it is not the perpetrators who are made to feel shame by society but the victims.
It is an upside-down world.
This forced shame is rooted in historic misogyny and it survives on the notion that women invite these kinds of crimes somehow. Its effect is that it allows perpetrators, and their enablers, to continue offending with impunity, because when you hand shame to the victim rather than the perpetrator, you stop that victim from speaking about what happened to them.
This is why Gisèle’s comment was so powerful – because it reminds us of the absurdity of the notion that society makes us feel ashamed of crimes committed against us.
It reminds us that the most important thing we can do is try to hand that shame back, to insist that those who are guilty of doing something shameful are the ones to carry it.
I recently read some academic research on trauma which identified another key idea that Gisèle’s comment alludes to: When a perpetrator commits a depraved act and transmits their shame to the victim, they destroy their most important witness.
By forcing shame on a victim, you ensure they will feel unable to speak up.
By telling them – or simply relying on society to tell them – that they somehow deserved what happened to them, a perpetrator ensures his crime has no witnesses.
Because if you destroy the agency of the one other person in the room, you neutralise the possibility of capture.
So many activists, Gisèle included, are doing us a great service now by beginning to take away a perpetrator’s ability to do this.
By refusing to feel ashamed, they are sending a message to both victims and perpetrators that this tool of misogyny doesn’t always work.
When she made it through that trial and helped ensure a guilty verdict against all 51 men, she showed us that sometimes we can make shame change sides.
Those men were finally forced to carry their own shame, to accept responsibility for the acts they had committed.
It’s important to remember that not all victims have this luxury.
Gisèle Pelicot is white, middle-class, and lived in a place where authorities – from what we can tell – were broadly supportive of her fight for justice.
There are many victims out there who would not be able to survive this ordeal in the same way.
But her voice will hopefully make a dent in the institutional barriers that hold up other inequalities too, contributing to a safer world for victims to speak up.
Certainly her voice has reached the ears of perpetrators, who now have heard the resounding message: You are no longer safe from your own shame.
This article was written by Lucia Osborne-Crowley – an Australian-trained lawyer, legal reporter and author of The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell – for The Weekly’s March 2025 issue.
If you or someone you know has been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, help is always available. Call 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit their website.
