Yes, it may be draconian – but ALL rapists like those in the appalling Pelicot case should be CASTRATED

Given the sheer horror of the case of Dominique Pelicot, the Frenchman who drugged his wife with sleeping pills for ten years and filmed dozens of men he met on the Internet raping her, it is understandable that most of the reactions come from women.

Like many men, I am even hesitant to raise my head above the ground when talking about such heinous crimes committed by people of my own gender.

The big risk is that every attempt will be met with the observation that men can never understand what it is like to be the victim of a sexual assault.

That said, I think it’s important for men to join the debate. Otherwise, there is a danger that society as a whole will fail to identify the root causes of the problem and therefore fail to find possible solutions.

“Women have very little idea how much men hate them,” Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch, accompanying many a 1970s feminist rallying cry that “All men are rapists.”

Indeed, it is difficult to refute this feeling, given the ordinariness of the fifty people convicted by a French court last week, including a firefighter, a truck driver, a soldier, a roofer, a nurse and a DJ. The case suggested that all men harbor dark predations in their hearts and are capable of doing as the Pelicot men did.

What could have driven the “Monster of Mazan” – that “submissive bitch” scribbled on his comatose wife as she lay on the ground in front of every rapist – other than misogyny?

Unfortunately, sex attacks happen in every country. And every country has different ways of dealing with such crimes.

Some (China, Afghanistan, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and North Korea) punish rape with death.

In Saudi Arabia, Sharia courts have sentenced perpetrators to 80 to 1,000 lashes and prison terms of up to ten years.

In Norway, the minimum penalty is three years in prison.

Castration is sometimes a punishment. Some US states allow shorter sentences for sex offenders who agree to voluntary chemical castration.

In September, the government in Italy, where I live, led by the country’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, announced its intention to introduce voluntary chemical castration for rapists and pedophiles.

Such voluntary schemes have already been trialled in a number of prisons in England and Scotland. They involve the prisoner, in exchange for early release, and agree to take drugs that lower their testosterone levels to that of a pre-pubescent boy, thus reducing their desire to commit heinous acts.

The failure to follow up on pilot projects in British prisons suggests that results from the few institutions participating in trials in early 2010 were mixed at best. Chemical castration relies on continued treatment outside of prison, whether it involves taking pills every day or having an injection every six months.

My wife Carla is the mother of our six children (three boys and three girls). Although she is left-wing in many areas such as wars and migration, she even goes further than Meloni in this area.

About the Pelicot case, she says: “All attackers should be castrated. Not only chemically, but also surgically. Everything off! Anyone who does such things to a drugged woman is disgusting.”

Carla is a devout Catholic and believes in mercy and forgiveness of sins. But here she certainly speaks for many people, both men and women.

The policy advocated by my wife has been tried in Germany. It was a voluntary scheme, with offenders invited to have their testicles removed. But given that only an average of five people took up the offer per year, its effectiveness in reducing sex crimes is difficult to say.

Predictably, under pressure from human rights advocates who deemed the practice “torture” and “degrading,” Germany stopped surgical castration in 2017.

It is of course a great irony that while many left-wing activists oppose voluntary chemical castration of rapists and pedophiles, they endorse similar hormone therapy treatments for teenagers who want to change gender.

But where Germany is afraid to move, the American state of Louisiana has no such objections. In June, the Republican governor announced that judges could order offenders guilty of certain sex crimes against children to undergo surgical castration.

And this is where I agree with my wife. Men like Pelicot, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison, should be castrated, not only voluntarily as part of an imaginary cure, but also surgically, to deter and above all to punish others. To humiliate.

It is certainly wrong to view rape or pedophilia as a disease that can be cured, rather than as a crime that must be punished.

But that doesn’t explain why ordinary men commit such heinous crimes against women. Pornography is a possible explanation, but the real cause is undoubtedly the brutal attitude of some men.

I agree with the message expressed in a graffiti piece in Avignon, where the Pelicot trial was held, which reads: ‘C’est le machisme qui tue, pas le porno’ (It is machismo that kills, not porn) .

Machismo. Or what many on the left call “patriarchy.”

According to this view, men kill and rape women because we live in male-dominated societies in which men exercise control over women.

But the problem is that we no longer live in a patriarchy. Unless you count certain extreme Islamic societies – or, in Italy, the mafia.

Today, macho men feel like they have been metaphorically castrated, which is why I believe Meloni is on to something when she says that the crimes of such men are “linked to their weakness” and not to a sense of superiority.

This was in response to a gruesome murder case in Italy that has sparked much national reflection, as has Pelicot in France.

A 22-year-old university student from a middle-class family kidnapped and murdered his ex-girlfriend by stabbing her 57 times.

Meloni added that there was an “evolution in motivation” [of male violence] that we must study and understand’.

She’s right to say that a loss of cultural and social dominance ignites a bad fuse for some men, a disturbing number of whom seem otherwise “normal.”

And given that gender equality is here to stay in Western society, there is no easy solution, and perhaps none. A malignant condition like this can perhaps only be mitigated.

This is where forced castration can play its role, as a tool to prevent further sexual crimes against the most twisted of individuals and as a deterrent this would be the humiliation for men like the monsters of Mazan.