A Review of Horrible Things Men Have Done to Women

I genuinely wonder how many stories about violence against women we have to hear before people stop treating them as isolated incidents and start looking at the pattern. Another woman murdered by her partner, another rape trial, another group of men sharing advice about how to drug women, another woman explaining that she said no and was ignored, another mother discovering that the man she trusted was secretly filming or abusing women, another headline that disappears from everyone's feed after a few days while women are left to carry the fear long after everyone else has moved on. At a certain point, it becomes impossible for me to look at these stories as individual examples of "bad men" without also asking what kind of culture allows this behaviour to develop, hide itself, spread between men and, in some cases, become almost recreational.

The case of Gisèle Pelicot is probably one of the clearest and most horrifying examples of this reality. Her husband, Dominique Pelicot, drugged her repeatedly over almost a decade and invited men he met online to rape her while she was unconscious. In December 2024, a French court convicted all 51 defendants who stood trial, including Pelicot himself, who received a 20-year sentence. The horror of the case was not simply that one man abused his wife, but that dozens of other men were willing to participate after being invited into her home and seeing that she was unconscious. Some of them came repeatedly. Some were married or had families of their own. These were not men who had accidentally wandered into an ambiguous sexual situation where they misunderstood a woman's signals. They were men who knew she was unconscious and still chose to sexually assault her.

And that is one of the things about the Pelicot case that stays with me. We are so accustomed to hearing that women need to be careful around strangers that we can forget how often the danger exists inside ordinary-looking lives, inside marriages, relationships, homes and social circles. Gisèle was not attacked because she was walking alone at night in a dangerous neighbourhood. She was attacked in her own home, by her husband and by men who were willing to enter that home and violate a woman who could not consent.

What happened to her also completely destroys one of the most persistent myths about rape, which is that rape is primarily about uncontrolled sexual desire. There was nothing uncontrollable about what happened to Gisèle. There was planning, communication, drugs, invitations, secrecy, repeated visits and deliberate decisions. Rape is not an accident that happens because a man "couldn't help himself." Sexual violence involves choices, and the Pelicot case is a devastating reminder of just how deliberate those choices can be.

Then there is the disturbing world that has been developing online, where sexual violence can be discussed, encouraged and normalised in communities that give men the feeling that they are surrounded by people who approve of what they want to do. Recent investigations into so-called online "rape academies" have exposed forums and messaging groups where men discussed drugging women, sexually assaulting unconscious women, concealing evidence and sharing material depicting abuse. There is an important correction to make here because social media has circulated wildly inflated claims about millions of men being members of a single "rape academy." That is not supported by the evidence. The underlying problem is real, but the viral numbers have been distorted, and we do not need invented statistics to make the reality horrifying enough. Investigations have found much smaller but very real communities where sexual violence was being encouraged and facilitated.

In Germany, authorities have also uncovered a Telegram-based sexual predator network in which members allegedly used coded language to discuss rape and drugging, shared photographs and videos of attacks, and targeted women in Germany. Several men have been convicted, and investigators have found connections extending beyond Germany. The existence of these networks matters because the internet does not merely provide a place where an individual predator can privately consume something disturbing. It can allow people with the same violent interests to find each other, exchange knowledge, encourage one another and create an environment where behaviour that would be horrifying to most people becomes normal inside the group.

This is also why I find the idea that online misogyny is "just words" so difficult to accept. Words can create environments. Communities can teach people what is normal. Repetition can make disgusting ideas feel ordinary, particularly when someone is surrounded by other people who laugh at the same things, encourage the same fantasies and constantly tell each other that women are objects rather than human beings with boundaries.

We have also seen the other side of this online world through private Facebook groups created by women to warn each other about men. These groups are complicated because they can contain genuine warnings about abusive men, rapists, serial cheaters, scammers and predators, but they can also create problems involving rumours, privacy, defamation and accusations that have not been independently established. There is research showing that women affected by violence do seek support through online communities, including for information and emotional support.

I actually think the existence of these groups tells us something important, even when individual posts within them are questionable. Women would not feel such a need to quietly warn one another if they felt that the formal systems around them consistently protected them, informed them and gave them reliable ways to identify dangerous people before they were harmed. Women have always warned each other. Our grandmothers did it over coffee, our mothers did it on the telephone, and now women do it through private Facebook groups. The technology changed, but the underlying reason did not.

Of course, women should not have to become amateur investigators just to date safely, and I don't believe that every accusation posted anonymously online should automatically be treated as fact. There needs to be room for due process, evidence and responsible moderation. But I also refuse to mock women for wanting information about a man before allowing him into their lives when we know that sexual violence and intimate partner violence are not rare, imaginary problems.

The statistics make that very clear.

According to the World Health Organization's latest estimates, nearly one in three women worldwide, approximately 32 percent, have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner or non-partner sexual violence during their lifetime.

In the European Union, the numbers are also deeply uncomfortable. Eurostat's EU gender-based violence survey found that around 31 percent of women aged 18 to 74, approximately 50 million women, had experienced physical violence, threats or sexual violence in adulthood. Eighteen percent of women who had ever had a partner reported experiencing physical or sexual violence from that partner, while 4 percent of women reported having experienced rape by a non-partner.

And then there is femicide, which is the most extreme end of this continuum.

The 2023 UNODC and UN Women estimates found that approximately 51,100 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or other family members in 2023, representing around 60 percent of all intentional killings of women and girls that year. That works out to approximately 140 women and girls every single day being killed by someone in their own family or intimate relationship.

The updated 2024 estimates are similarly horrifying, with around 50,000 women and girls killed by intimate partners or family members, approximately 137 every day. The fact that men are not the victims of intimate partner and family-member homicide at anything close to the same proportion matters here too. The UN data found that intimate partners or family members were responsible for 60 percent of killings of women and girls in 2024, compared with 11 percent of male homicides.

When I read statistics like that, I don't think the appropriate response is to tell women to be less frightened. I think the appropriate response is to ask why women are being asked to carry so much of the responsibility for preventing violence committed against them.

We teach girls to watch their drinks, share their locations, carry their phones, check the back seat of their cars, avoid certain neighbourhoods, be careful with dating apps, keep their keys between their fingers, tell friends where they are going, avoid walking alone, watch how much they drink and make sure they can get home safely. Those precautions can absolutely be useful, but there is something deeply backwards about building an entire culture of female safety advice around controlling women's behaviour while giving comparatively less attention to teaching boys and men that another person's body is not theirs to access.

A woman can follow every safety rule in the world and still be raped by her husband. She can be sober and still be raped. She can be wearing pyjamas and still be raped. She can be unconscious and still be raped. She can have willingly kissed someone and still not consent to sex. She can change her mind. She can be someone's girlfriend. She can be someone's wife. She can trust the person standing in front of her.

None of these things create consent where consent does not exist.

And I think that is one of the most important lessons coming out of the Pelicot case. Gisèle's decision to allow the public trial to continue instead of protecting her privacy at all costs turned her suffering into something larger than herself. She has repeatedly insisted that shame belongs to the perpetrators, not to her, and that message matters because rape has historically been surrounded by an enormous amount of shame placed on the person who was violated rather than on the person who violated her.

I don't want women to live their lives terrified of men, and I don't think fear should become our entire personality or our entire approach to relationships. There are good men, loving men, respectful men and men who would be horrified by the behaviour described in these cases. But acknowledging that does not require us to minimise the scale of violence against women, dismiss uncomfortable statistics or pretend that misogyny is harmless when we can see how it can feed into real-world abuse.

What I want is for women to stop being told that our fear is irrational when the evidence tells us that our concerns are not coming from nowhere.

I want boys to grow up understanding consent before they ever enter a sexual relationship.

I want men to challenge their friends when they make degrading comments about women rather than laughing along because they don't want to be the "uncool" guy.

I want platforms to take online sexual violence seriously instead of waiting until journalists expose horrifying communities before anyone acts.

I want victims to be believed without abandoning fairness and due process.

I want abusive men to face consequences before their behaviour escalates into something irreversible.

And I want women to stop feeling embarrassed for talking to each other about safety.

Because after everything we have learned from cases like Gisèle Pelicot's, from online predator networks and from decades of research into sexual and intimate partner violence, I don't think the answer is for women to become quieter. I think the answer is for society to finally become uncomfortable enough to listen.

Thankful for your presence, Neja