FRANCE Rape, Torture, and the Female Condition
Torture has been denounced as an action against the Principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Charter of Nuremberg.
And what about the Rights of Woman?
The definition of torture is as follows: bodily and psychological torment perpetuated against the will of the victim with the aim of annihilation of his personhood by breaking his resistance. RAPE is the term applied in the case of a woman who refuses sexual relations imposed on her by force. Legally, rape is recognized as a crime with physical aspects only; namely, the penetration of the penis in the vagina against the will of the victim. In effect, however, the real crime is the annihilation by the man of the woman as a human being. It means breaking her resistance by means of sex.
Rape is a class crime of men as a group against women as a group. Every woman is a potential victim of rape: little girls, adolescents, single women, married women, middle-aged women... and even dead women. Society countenances rape and becomes an accomplice to it, so that it lends support to a situation of permanent insecurity on the part of all women. The woman who refuses the status that is imposed by patriarchal ideology is morally raped everyday by a series of structures and institutions that tend to deny her integrity and her identity as woman.
Women live in terror of rape from the most tender age. An incredible number of children are victims of sexual aggression even in their own families or from relatives. The climate of terror thus formed continues into adulthood and pushes women to look for "protection" just where it cannot be secured: from men. On the other hand, from childhood on, every woman, as a potential rape victim, is made to feel guilty and is accused of provocation. Thus it is that the guilty men can throw the blame back on the women victims.
The consequences are that in France rape is a crime that is talked about very little, which women are ashamed to report.
Only one out of 20 women who are raped, dares to report the crime (1,538 in 1974) and even fewer cases come before the courts. Often a report of rape is changed to a case of maltreatment and assault (see the case of Anne and Aracelli and of Eve and Monique). Among the men accused of rape few are sentenced, or the sentences passed are not severe and are often not fully served. Three personal testimonies on rape were presented by a French group at the Tribunal (Eve, Helene, and Anne and Aracelli) together with a fourth victim who was not present.
Eve was raped by three men in the course of an improvised evening out with a group of youths that she met in the square where she lives. The examining judge has still not accepted her testimony of rape, and the three youths who raped her are being looked for because of other crimes they committed.
Helene was raped at the age of 14 by the best friend of her father, who had died only a little time before. Seriously traumatized, she suffered for years from a series of psychological disturbances and only at the age of 18 managed the courage to speak of this terrible experience. Treated like a whore and made to feel guilty, she never dared to report the crime.
Anne and Aracelli, who don't hide their being lesbians, were raped by three men after a violent struggle during their vacation in France the summer of 1974. After a long legal battle, their aggressors, first sentenced for maltreatment and assault, will be tried for rape in a higher court.
Monique went out to have a drink at the house of a couple of friends and found herself in a scene that seemed like something taken from "The Story of O". Legally, she was not raped because in spite of the torments she suffered, she was not penetrated by a penis. The organizer of the little evening of fun has denied the facts, considering them, after all, not very serious.
Rape is the only crime in which the victim is treated like the accused, because society prefers to deny rather than to punish. With rape the man tries to subject and humiliate the woman and, if possible, to make her participate in her own subjugation and humiliation.
These are the aims the patriarchal society tries to achieve: nuclear families, economic exploitation, a hierarchy of class, authoritarian religion, militarism, control of our reproductive functions, and sexist permissiveness camouflaged as "liberalization". As long as these structures persist, we will continue to be raped.
We ourselves must take up the struggle against rape so that we don't continue to be victims. We can individually and collectively break the silence. We must report the men who rape us, report it despite the shame, the disgust, and the wish to forget; we must carry out our actions before the courts with thoroughness; we must demand not only the revision of laws on rape but in confronting rape demand to have nothing to do with men, but to have women doctors, women jurists, and women police, sustaining ourselves mutually, morally, and materially in all our countries, LEARNING TO KNOW OURSELVES AND TO DEFEND OURSELVES.
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