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25-11-2024
PARIS: Thousands of people have taken to the streets across France to protest against sexual violence.
The protests on Saturday come two days before the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
In the capital, Paris, large crowds of women and men marched waving purple placards that denounced gender-based violence and defended women’s reproductive rights.
Demonstrators voiced concerns about a possible rollback on women’s rights in the United States when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House in January. Vice President-elect JD Vance said he would like a national abortion ban in a podcast interview in 2022, but has since emphasized that individual states should determine their policies.
The French newspaper Le Monde reported that roughly 80,000 protesters took to the streets in Paris, with 400 different organizations taking part in demonstrations. It said thousands of people also took to the streets in smaller cities across the nation, including 1,500 in Renne outside Lyon in the southeastern part of France.
France enshrined abortion rights in the constitution in March, a move largely seen as a response to the US move to roll back key reproductive rights protections in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned decades-old laws protecting abortion rights nationally. While abortion has been legal since 1975 in France, the constitutional change explicitly guaranteed abortion access. France was the first country in the world to do so.
Protesters also voiced solidarity with Gisele Pelicot, whose ex-husband Dominique Pelicot and 50 other co-defendants are on trial over allegations that the men drugged and raped her while she was unconscious over a decade. In September, Dominique accepted the charges.
“Unfortunately, anybody can be a perpetrator of violence. It can be our brothers. It can be our fathers. It can be our colleagues. It can be our bosses. I think that’s the big shock for people,” said Maelle Noir, representing the feminist collective Nous Toutes, which translates as All of Us, told media at the Paris protest.
However, Gisele Pelicot, subjected to mass rape organized by her husband over a decade, has condemned the cowardice of the dozens of men accused of abusing her who claim they did not realize it was rape.
Her husband, Dominique Pelicot, recently admitted he drugged her and invited strangers to their house to rape her while she was unconscious in one of France’s most spectacular criminal trials in recent history.
Most of the 50 other men on trial have said they did not realize they were raping her, did not intend to rape her or put all the blame on her husband, who they said had manipulated them.
“For me, this is the trial of cowardice. There is no other way to describe it,” Gisele Pelicot said on Tuesday, adding that there was no excuse for abusing her when she was unconscious.
Video recorded by her husband and shown in court over the past weeks has repeatedly featured her motionless, sometimes snoring, while the accused abused her.
“When you walk into a bedroom and see a motionless body, at what point [do you decide] not to react,” she said in an address to the accused, many of whom were in the courtroom. “Why did you not leave immediately to report it to the police?” (Int’l News Desk)
