Pelícot: Rapists are not monsters
By Maria João Faustino, EWL Executive Committee Member
[The original text in Portuguese was published in Público and is available here.]
The monsterisation of the perpetrators is a strategy of comfort, which allows us to distance ourselves from the horror in an illusory way. The imaginary monster has a subtext: he is not one of us.
By now, we have all heard about the Mazan rape horror. For more than a decade, Dominique sedated Gisèle Pélicot, to whom he had (...) Read more

In the era of digitalisation, the incidence of cyber violence against women and girls (CVAWG) is surging. The advent of new technologies, particularly social media, has transformed the way we engage and communicate online. As our identity expresses itself also online, cyber violence against women appears as a continuum of violence against women. The same gender stereotypes and misogyny which cause the already known forms of violence against women, manifest online with new forms and similar (...) Read more