New gang rape scandal at Hockey Canada. Sexual misconduct allegations against comedian Philippe Bond. Conditional discharge for engineer Simon Houle guilty of sexual assault…
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
The overwhelming summer news is a reminder that there are no holidays for rape culture.
I remember the outcry the first time I used that expression in a column. It was in 2014. It was feminist author and literature professor at UQAM Martine Delvaux who opened my eyes to the phenomenon. She put the magnifying glass on a misogynistic culture that does not speak its name and which does not make headlines. A culture that sees women as things to be consumed, encourages and trivializes sexual violence and then accuses the victims of being responsible for it, of lying and enjoying it.
I remember the outcry. Not so much in relation to the phenomenon denounced as in relation to the words used.
“Come on, rape culture! What are you talking about ? You perpetuate a myth invented by frustrated feminists! Shame on you. »
It was a few months before the #aggressionnondénounée movement, born in the wake of the Ghomeshi affair, which released a certain word and made those who doubted it see that this culture, alas, is not an invention.
In 2017, other waves of denunciations followed in the wake of the Weinstein affair and the #metoo movement. Here, as in the United States, journalistic investigations have led to trials and important social debates.
There was an awakening of consciences and political actions. Heads rolled. Many, too, just hid in the sand.
five years later #metoo, we have reached how many waves already? I do not know anymore. As with COVID-19, we no longer want to count in the face of this “shadow pandemic” (according to the UN), aggravated by the health crisis. Waves and undertows follow each other, resemble each other and exhaust. And even if things are changing little by little thanks to the courage of victims who speak out and the journalistic work that leads to political relay, denial and willful blindness persist. People keep saying that this insidious culture that breaks so many victims does not exist.
We watch the girls fall. The “popular court” of the media is castigated, stupidly opposing “false” media justice and the “real” justice of the courts. Rather than salute the speeches of the victims and the rigorous journalistic work that do useful work, we cry “lynching”. We claim to protect the presumption of innocence while we only guarantee impunity to predators. Or we pretend to be surprised and outraged by what we ourselves swept under the rug before journalists lifted it.
Under Hockey Canada’s smelly carpet, there is such a pile that it makes huge bumps. The carpet covering sexual violence, which was financed by the dues of the members of the federation, looked like a camel. It could be the official rug of rape culture. But nobody at Hockey Canada had noticed, it seems, until the scandal burst in the public square, that the Minister of Sports Pascale St-Onge suspended the financing of the federation and that journalists continued to search the file. .
In addition to the gang rape that allegedly occurred on the sidelines of an event sponsored by Hockey Canada in 2018, we learned Friday that another sordid case of sexual assault involving members of the national junior team would have occurred in 2003. Half a dozen players are said to have filmed themselves assaulting a naked and unconscious woman, according to TSN.
Whether in hockey, entertainment or elsewhere, the same culture of silence and concealment is at work. We are not talking about individual predators. We are talking, to use the words of Jodi Kantor, one of the journalists of the New York Times that uncovered the Weinstein scandal, of a “complete system of silencing women and erasing their experiences”.
When we denounce the culture of rape, it is this system that is at fault. It is the whole institutional and social context that still makes it possible to trivialize sexual violence, to minimize its consequences, to relieve the aggressors of their responsibilities and to shift the blame to the victims.
This is exactly what we saw with Hockey Canada, which miserably managed serious allegations of gang rape.
This is exactly what we saw in the Philippe Bond case, to whom employers continued to offer contracts even though his behavior had been known for a long time.
This is exactly what we saw in the Simon Houle case, this engineer who was offered a conditional discharge by a young judge for a sexual assault because he did it quickly, is still ” good character” and that it would be so sad to harm his career. (The sentence has fortunately been appealed and Judge Matthieu Poliquin is the subject of a complaint to the Conseil de la magistrature.)
It would be reassuring to think that the culture that still makes such things possible in 2022 is that of old dinosaurs on the verge of extinction. Alas, in these three cases, we see that the species renews itself. And that there are still many rugs to lift.