Living with monsters
Some thoughts on the Gisele Pelicot and Sara Sharif cases
Last week was the week of monsters. In France prison sentences were handed out to the dozens of men who raped Gisèle Pelicot at the suggestion of her “family man” husband, Dominique. Here in Britain the adults in the household of Urfan Sharif were also sentenced to prison - he for the murder and torture of a child whose crime seems to have been the possession of a personality. Both Sharif and Pelicot were immediately dubbed “monsters”. And so they are.
A “monster” according to almost all definitions is an unnatural, strange creature, whose appearance or behaviour is far out of the ordinary. And it seems reasonable to believe that on the far edges of the human bell-curve are the people who cannot contain their anger and their violence, or have an entire absence of conscience, just as there are people of really remarkable kindness and capacity for self-sacrifice.
What makes a monster?
So the first question isn’t really whether or not potential monsters live among us, but the circumstances under which their monstrosity is actuated. Repeatedly beating a child with a metal pole or drugging your wife so she can be raped are not acts someone is likely to imagine that society approves of. What gives rise to the person being so unconstrained that they act out their terrible instincts and act them out in a particular way?
Sharif felt entitled to beat his family, especially the female members. A taxi driver working long hours and living in extremely straitened circumstances with a large family including disabled twins, he actively contested attempts to have them taken into care. He clearly found some kind of power and relief in his capacity to silence and subdue family members through physical force. He seems to be, if you like, a rage monster. I can’t find any reference to his upbringing in Pakistan, but I would be surprised if his own father was not also violent.
Dominique Pelicot, for all the talk of a “split personality” (French psychologists also use Jekyll and Hyde as a descriptive device) seems to be a straightforward empathy-free psychopath, who was an active sexual deviant for years, even before he and his wife left Paris for the warmth of the South of France in 2011. When living in the capital he was almost certainly a rapist of women who were unknown to him and had quite possibly committed murder in the early 1990s.
He then retired to indulge a couple of less physically taxing paraphilias, one of them astonishing in its particularity, which was observing others engage in a form of living necrophilia. I haven’t yet heard exactly what it was that gave Pelicot his satisfaction – watching the tapes of the raped wife or of the raping men. Part of me doesn’t want to know.
The multiple personality tag appears to me to be applied because we have difficulty imagining how people can live one kind of life – for example, to be an extreme sexual deviant – alongside a “normal” one. But the literature is full of men with secret families, let alone serial philanders and gambling addicts whose other lives only become apparent when they finally run out of money. Some people are truly heroic liars and others truly epic trusters. (There is some talk of Pelicot being sexually abused as a child, but I don’t know on what authority and in any case it’s a claim that now seems standard in any case of male sexual crime).
Urfan Sharif’s co-accused behaved dreadfully. His wife, Sara’s stepmother Beinash Batool, is 13 years younger than her husband and is thought initially to have tried (if not very hard) to persuade Sharif to moderate his violence. In the end, however, she was fully complicit. His younger brother, Faisal Malik, knew what was happening but said nothing. Batool received a 30 year sentence and Malik 16 years for crimes that they perhaps they wouldn’t have committed if they hadn’t been related to Sharif. So they aren’t monsters and nor do I think the 70 or more men who raped Gisèle Pelicot can be described as monsters, even if they behaved monstrously in indulging a deviancy, the whole point of which was that the victim would have no shred of choice - the ultimate objectification. It would be comforting if they could. I’m not saying they could be any of us, but they certainly could be on the same train, plane or street that you’re reading this.