The scale of male complicity in sexual violence is global, confronting and persistently unaccounted for, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.
* CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses rape
SIXTY-TWO MILLION. That’s the number of visits in one month to the porn site Motherless.com, which hosts 20,000 “sleep” videos, made by men who have drugged and raped their girlfriends and wives. No, it’s not all men. But it’s tens of millions of them.
This horrific figure was highlighted by the CNN report ‘Exposing a global “rape academy”’ on 26 March. The concept of “sleep” videos (can we call them rape videos, please?) was made famous in the court case of French man Dominique Pelicot, who drugged and raped his unconscious wife, Gisèle, along with 50 of his friends and associates.
The world was confronted by this grotesque rape practice in 2024 during the mass rape and drugging trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men in southern France. Pelicot had been drugging and raping his wife for nine years and inviting friends and acquaintances into his home to share in the rape.
He uploaded the rape videos to an online forum where he helped to educate other men on how to drug and rape their partners. He has also been charged with murdering and raping a 23-year-old woman, and attempting to rape another.
Pelicot’s trial received a huge amount of media interest. Yet, like most coverage of male violence against women, the conversation focused on the individually villainous Pelicot and his courageous wife, Gisèle, without focusing on the collective nature of this crime.
Pelicot was treated as the ringmaster and the 50 other rapists as a side note in the whole narrative. At the same time, Pelicot’s legal team, along with the 50 other men charged, did their best to characterise themselves as victims rather than admit their crimes.
Pelicot made all kinds of excuses for his long-term abuse of his wife. He apparently suffered from an inferiority complex because his wife came from a privileged background and he was working class. He also implied he had no choice but to rape his wife because she wouldn’t do the sexual acts like swinging that he wanted her to do with him.
The fact that I even have to say that none of this justifies rape – indeed, nothing justifies rape – is part of the problem here.
The 50 men involved also tried to present themselves as innocent dupes – victims of Pelicot’s manipulation – with many claiming they didn’t realise they were raping an unconscious woman.
When I first heard about the Pelicot case, I remember thinking that this was a collective crime, not an individual one.
Over nine years, not one of the 50 rapists thought it was a good idea – a morally correct idea – to turn down Pelicot’s offer of sex with his unconscious wife and to report him to police. The same goes for the people who watched the videos and took no action to alert authorities, to show any concern, or to try to stop what was happening.
So, yes, the crimes themselves were carried out by 51 men, but the crime was made possible by every single man who watched the videos and did nothing about it. They enabled the crimes. They covered them up. Each one of them is part of this collective criminal behaviour.
The CNN report has now exposed that this collective crime of Pelicot and his co-rapists and enabler audiences is not just a single rape-collective but is a global phenomenon.
I’ll say the number again just so you can let it settle a bit more. Sixty-two million watch these rape videos made by men drugging and raping their partners in their own homes. Sixty-two million.
Women have, of course, been outraged by this news and the scale of the co-conspiracy in these crimes. They have been flocking to their group chats and their social media feeds to voice their anger and outrage.
Yet, of course, this is not where the story ends. We know well enough by now in our patriarchal, misogynist society that we can’t have a mature conversation about the rape academy without it being undermined and derailed by the “not all men” brigade working to minimise the problem.
As soon as women started highlighting the number of men who visited the rape academy site, people (mostly men) in response started calling the 62-million-figure “misinformation”. They said it implied that 62 million men were raping their unconscious partners and that this was false.
In fact, women never said 62 million men were involved in the raping themselves. Women’s concern was that 62 million men were collectively engaged in the crime through their consumption of the content and their failure to report it. They were therefore co-conspirators, enablers, complicit, aiding and abetting the rapists and helping them monetise their crimes.
This pushback against women’s complaints about this behaviour is typical of men always claiming to be the victim whenever conversations arise about men’s bad behaviour.
Just as Pelicot worked to make himself the victim to justify his crime, these men are claiming women are over-exaggerating the problem of 1,000 men raping their partners and 62 million watching them do it, to minimise, deflect, and to make the whole thing go away.
Yet, the truth is, men in every country, in every community, are engaged in this depravity. They are organised. They are training each other. They are sending each other drugs. They are logging in and watching, egging each other on. They are monetising rape content. They are covering up each other’s crimes. They are being hosted by commercial websites. They are drugging and raping the women with whom they have built relationships, who they share children with, who they have breakfast with each morning, who their partners believe they are safe with.
They are watching this and are doing nothing to stop it. This is all out in the open. It is a global mass-rape conspiracy violently traumatising women in their own homes. Sixty-two million are involved in it. They are all to blame.
And the worst part? This global depravity is just a mere blip on the major news outlet news cycle, likely because of the minimising narrative of men.
Interested to see how much traction the rape academy story was getting after the CNN report, I searched the global news database Newsbank for mentions of the words “rape academy”. Surely a story this big would generate a public discussion about the crisis of male violence against women, about domestic violence, about this being a global problem that governments needed to address immediately.
Yet, what I found horrified me just as much as the existence of the rape academy. In total, amongst the thousands of news outlets in Newsbank, there were ten unique articles mentioning “rape academy” since the 24 March report. Ten. Five in America, two in Australia (including The Canberra Times and Toowoomba's The Chronicle), one in Nigeria, one in the UK and one in the Cook Islands.
Clearly, major news outlets do not want to talk about the horrific behaviour of millions of men, enough men to fill a medium-sized country. No, it’s not all men. It’s 62 million of them, though.
See why women would prefer to meet a bear in the woods than a man?
If you would like to speak to someone about sexual violence, please call the 1800 Respect hotline on 1800 737 732 or chat online, or Lifeline on 13 11 14. In an emergency, please call 000.
Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. You can follow her on Threads @drvicfielding or Bluesky @drvicfielding.bsky.social.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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