In France, #MeToo is having a second moment. A year after 13 women accused Gerard Depardieu of sexual assault on film sets in April 2023, the French actor is having to reckon with fresh charges of sexual misconduct during the shooting of the 2022 film “The Green Shutters”. Equally, if not more impactful, have been actress Judith Godrèche’s decision to press charges against high-profile film directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon for rape and sexual assault. Godrèche has now called for a parliamentary enquiry into working conditions in the cinema industry, along with its “risks for children”.
Another striking development is that French men are opening up about sexual assault for the first time via the hashtag #MeTooGarçons (in English, #MeTooBoys). Actors Aurélien Wiick and Francis Renaud recently revealed that they had been sexually abused as youth by film directors or producers.
To better understand this phenomenon, The Conversation France sat down with sociologist Lucie Wicky, a PhD student researching the specific nature of sexual violence against boys and young men.
You are the first researcher in France to research sexual violence against men in detail. How did you go about it?
I based my work on the 2015 Virage study, which carried out phone interviews with more than 27,000 respondents between 20 and 69 living in mainland France. Similarly to the first survey on violence against women 25 years ago, the study asks respondents whether they suffered assaults in the last twelve months, and throughout their life.
The survey takes respondents’ biography into account and deals with the full spectrum of sexual violence, from the psychological to the physical level. It covers public life, on the one hand, by looking into schools, workplaces and public spaces, and private life on the other, by investigating couples, ex-partner, family and friends. The questionnaires avoid the terms violence or rape, which are fraught, and instead lists the facts and leaves it up to each respondent to answer “Yes” or “No”, as many of the respondents did not identify the violence as such.
Finally, I conducted 50 biographical interviews with men who had reported sexual violence in the Virage survey and agreed to an additional interview. I also interviewed 10 women to provide a point of comparison.
We don’t have a lot more data, precisely because of the type of investment that this type of survey requires. And that also says a lot about the extent to which public authorities take into consideration this violence.
I also believe that were the survey to be repeated today, the figures would be higher, thanks to the rise of the #MeToo movement. The movement has certainly helped to qualify the violence suffered by victims. Part of my research focuses precisely on this question.
In what sense?
My thesis looks at the violence suffered by men at different points in their lives, whether as children, teenagers or adults, and the way in which they describe it. During the interviews, I realised that some of the respondents found it difficult to qualify the abuse they had suffered as “sexual violence”, especially when the abuse occurred during adolescence or adulthood.
On the other hand, when the event occurred during childhood (mainly before the age of 11), a victim is more likely to express their feelings “easily” once they have described it. Some of them talk about the event in the third person to distance themselves from violence suffered. The majority describe sexual violence committed by other men, usually adults, who usually have a position of domination.
This led me to rework the very definition of gender-based violence. I decided to reclassify some of the facts described by the respondents as sexual assaults, even when they did not state it in this way. Their accounts describe sexual practices constrained by interactional and structural relations of domination, in other words, domination linked to power relations: gender, social status, age, etc.
What also struck me was the public focus on the facts in terms of a gradation from touching to rape, in a rather heteronormative legal straitjacket – i.e., where heterosexuality is the norm – but which does not necessarily reflect feelings and perceived seriousness. Thus, for many of the respondents, it is indeed exposure to violence through repetition, duration, frequency, the environment, proximity to the perpetrator – without there necessarily being systematic violence with penetration – that influences the feeling of seriousness.
How do you explain this phenomenon of “silencing” rather than taboo that you describe in your work?
We need to distinguish between “silencing” and taboo. On the one hand, men who have been sexually abused mainly talk about acts committed during childhood and adolescence (80% of sexual violence reported occurred or began before the age of 18), and less so once they are adults. For women, this violence exists and continues throughout their lives. And when they do lodge a complaint, as a survey published in the UK in 2019 recently showed, their words are taken into account less than those of men, for whom complaints more often lead to a trial.
Like women, men rarely talk about the violence they suffered as children, but rather as adults. However, unlike women, they are more likely to be taken seriously when they talk about violence, and are more likely to be supported by those close to them, except when they are gay men. In these cases, as with women, they are made to feel responsible for their aggression, as if their bodies were in fact sexualised, and they are reminded of the heterosexual order by being made to feel responsible for the sexual violence they have suffered. In other words, society considers that “men are children before the age of 11 while women are "girls” whatever their age at the time of the violence", unless they identify as gay men.
But the common denominator is that they were all assaulted mainly by men (adults, sometimes minors too; according to the interviews, they are always older than the victims, but the data don’t allow us to be as precise). On that basis, I don’t think we can talk about a taboo, but we can talk about silencing.
According to my results, these practices operate at different levels. First of all, structurally, with, for example, the late creation of a number, 119, which has been free since 2003, but also reports that are not followed up and complaints that come to nothing.
Everything serves to remind victims that their stories will not lead to any action or punishment for the violence. These structural practices permeate the institution of the family: when there is violence, no one talks about it, no one reacts. And, of course, there is the level of silence imposed by the perpetrator(s). Very often these are downplayed or internalised as being “normal”, including by the perpetrators who will talk about “initiation” to sexuality or “games” for example.
How do you explain the fact that so many people are speaking out today?
The emergence of social networks provides new spaces for both men and women to speak out. These socio-historical effects and those of the legitimisation of speech, driven more by celebrities, are now producing a greater number of people speaking out than in the past, leading to a degree of visibility, combined with a partial social awareness of the reality of sexual violence, despite the fact that it has long been observed and described.
This is where the generational effect also plays a role: men who grew up in the 1950s, until around 1980, lived with the idea that a child is silent and that his or her words are not important. At the dinner table, in public, with adults… A child does not speak, either within the family or within public spaces.
Male and adult domination is illustrated here through the figure of the all-powerful man, the “head of the family” with a hegemonic role within the household. He leaves no places for discussion. This was also part of the way in which masculinity was viewed, valued in the past through a certain form of violence, less so today. This is also why men who suffered violence after the start of their gender construction – in adolescence or young adulthood – find it hard to see themselves as victims.
How do you analyse these changing times?
My research questions the concept of childhood that has long been dominant: one in which the social hierarchies and the needs of adults take precedence over those of children.
Children’s voices are discredited and silenced, and their bodies are not respected. When we force a child to kiss an adult, when we physically constrain him, we remind him that the adult has control over his body, and that his body does not belong to him.
Not talking to children, not teaching them that their bodies are their own, not taking into account what they have to say, their mobilisation (think of the high school strikes for example and the heavy repression in response) hinders their understanding of violence but also their autonomy and thus shapes their vulnerability.
Perhaps today we need to rethink the status of minor and what it covers to better protect children – and perhaps also consider letting them protect themselves.
Interview by Clea Chakraverty.