Agota Lavoyer: When boys become perpetrators

At the end of April, a verdict against Harvey Weinstein was overturned in the USA. Public outrage was limited; only activists demonstrated. What does that tell us?

This tells us that violence against women has still not come into the public eye, and activists are mainly addressing the issue. Since #MeToo there has been more attention than before, but if we look at who denounces violence against women, makes it the subject of discourse, makes political advances, is really outraged and doesn’t just shrug their shoulders or trivialize the problem, that’s it there are still too few and not the vast majority.

Did the recent Weinstein verdict represent a setback for the #MeeToo movement?

No, on the contrary. It showed that the movement is still urgently needed.

Why did it take so long for violence against women to become a public scandal? We are approaching the middle of the 21st millennium.

It’s been an issue for a long time. Feminists and specialist organizations have been pointing this out and calling for action for many decades. But as long as men are the ones who are the majority on the stages and have their say as experts, as long as they are clearly overrepresented in powerful positions, for example in the management levels of media companies, the issue of sexual violence is not given the importance that it is would need. In other words, men benefit from the current system because as long as women fear sexual violence, they will change their behavior so that they do not threaten men’s dominance.

Interview

Raphaela Graf

Lavoyer sells out, born in Budapest in 1981, studied social work and has counseled victims of sexual violence for years. She is considered to have made the Swiss sexual criminal law revision possible and is committed to the prevention and intervention of violence against children. In 2022, her educational book for children “Is that okay?” was published, which was number 1 on the Swiss bestseller list for five weeks. Her new work just came onto the book market: “Every woman. About a society that trivializes and normalizes sexual violence« (Yes Publishing, 288 S., geb., 22 €).

Last weekend, hundreds demonstrated against the police and the judiciary in your town of Schaffhausen. Can you briefly describe the background? Does this public protest show that awareness of the issue is progressing?

In short: a woman was (allegedly) raped. A week later, the perpetrator’s lawyer lured the woman to his home, where his three friends brutally beat her and allegedly used sexual violence on her. This is all to stop her from reporting the (alleged) rapist. Afterwards, all authorities failed: the male forensic experts did not examine the woman’s intimate area despite the pain, the police officers behaved extremely unprofessionally and did not properly secure evidence and, above all, although there are video recordings of the crime, the four men are still at large to this day . What’s more, they even passed the recordings around town. The rape case was dropped, and the grievous bodily harm case has still not been brought to trial. Ah, and the lawyer is still practicing law.

The public protest shows how shocked people are that something like this is possible in Switzerland. And the case also shows that men can commit violence against women and have little to fear. While women are publicly shamed.

Sexual assaults and rapes are not just a problem in show business, but rather a phenomenon affecting society as a whole, recorded in all social classes and cultures, Eastern and Western. So it has nothing or not much to do with level of education or religious background?

No. Sexual violence occurs everywhere. There are perpetrators everywhere, regardless of social class, origin, religion or other characteristics. But the perpetrators have one thing in common: they are almost all men. And that’s not just a coincidence, it’s a system. This level of sexual violence is only possible because sexism, misogyny and patriarchal ideas of masculinity are still deeply anchored in our society.

In the title of your new book you paired Every Woman with an underscore…

The underscore after “Everyone_” stands for all people who identify as female or are read as such and for all those who were socialized as girls. On the other hand, I understand “woman” and “man” as social and historical constructs to which people are assigned based on certain characteristics and which determine their socialization. This happens within a patriarchal system in which there are only two genders and in which these two genders exist in a clear hierarchy to one another.

In Germany, 75 years of the Basic Law have just been celebrated and there are still some gaps. To mark the anniversary, there were calls for an expansion of the ban on discrimination with regard to sexual identity. What is the situation in the Swiss constitution?

In Switzerland we have a criminal law against discrimination and incitement to hatred – based on “race”, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. However, we would like to have it expanded to include discrimination based on gender and gender identity. It has been proven that such bans on discrimination protect the groups of people affected, which is why they are very important and must be expanded.

At the same time, a good law alone is not enough. Just recently, investigative research in Switzerland showed that over half of the reports of hate speech were either not accepted by the police or were never processed. In other words: the police simply did not fulfill their mission. This research shows that the police lack basic knowledge of this criminal law.

They were themselves exposed to sexual violence. Was working on your new book a kind of self-therapy?

No. I don’t need self-therapy. I need people who stand up against our patriarchal society and against violence against women and men who hold each other accountable. If my book can make a contribution to this, then my goal has been achieved.

You define the term sexual violence very broadly. But isn’t a woman happy to receive compliments or signs of admiration?

Yes, sure. But compliments and signs of admiration have nothing to do with sexual violence. Sexualized violence is an umbrella term that includes all behavior from appraising glances to catcalling, verbal and physical harassment, but also violence in the digital space to sexual assault and rape.

The fact that sexualized assaults are trivialized as compliments shows exactly what I explain in my book: We live in a society in which sexualized violence is still trivialized, normalized and sometimes ignored or even glorified.

You heard a lot of bad things during your counseling sessions. How do you deal with that?

As a social worker, I have learned to keep a professional distance from what I hear. At the same time, I am never just an expert, but always a woman and a person affected, and of course the work is close to me. But it also gives me a lot, not least the feeling that I can achieve so much as a collective. I channel my anger by being active on Instagram, giving presentations or writing books. This is my outlet and I am grateful to have it.

One chapter is titled: “Raised to be a perpetrator”…

When boys learn that they need sex and that women owe them sex and that “decorating” a woman is actually a yes, then they become men in whose value system a woman’s no doesn’t even exist. If we teach boys that dominance, especially over women, is a crucial quality of masculinity, then they will become men who feel entitled to see women as their possessions that they have the right to control. If necessary, by force. And so we raise boys to be perpetrators.

What needs to be done to combat sexual violence and eliminate it once and for all?

We must do everything we can to ensure that equality is not just a promise on paper. We will not become a non-violent society until we have equal rights. And we will not have equality as long as we allow men to commit so much violence against women. We must stand up against gender stereotypes, toxic ideas of masculinity, sexism, misogyny and racism.

We don’t have to ask ourselves primarily whether acts of sexual violence are criminally relevant, whether there is evidence, whether the person concerned is credible enough or why they don’t report it. But when we ask ourselves whether we are part of this injustice and whether we are doing enough at all levels to prevent sexual violence, today and in the future.

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