68 Books & arts The Economist February 6th 2021
sexual violence. Moreover, the burden is
on even a minor under 15 to prove that
there was no consent.
But what constitutes consent? This is
the conundrum at the heart of Vanessa
Springora’s memoir. Published in French
last year, it comes out in English this
month. Ms Springora was 13 years old, her
parents having separated, when her moth-
er dragged her along one evening to a din-
ner party with literary friends. One guest,
who she later learned was Gabriel Matz-
neff, a novelist, could not take his eyes off
her. “No man had ever looked at me like
that before,” she writes. Thus began the
writer’s ruthless pursuit, which led to a
sexual relationship with Ms Springora that
began when she was 14. He was nearly 50.
The word that best captures the com-
plex psychological dependency that Ms
Springora narrates in this chilling account
is emprise: the hold, or grip, in which the
older man traps his pubescent prey. Not by
physical force, but manipulation and the
cold exercise of power. Anxious for affec-
tion, she thought she entered into this re-
lationship willingly: “I felt adored as never
before.” But did she really? “Are you aware
he’s a paedophile?” her mother asks casu-
ally when the girl first confides in her.
When the teenage Ms Springora puts such
thoughts to Mr Matzneff, he brushes them
off as puritan nonsense and insists on her
good fortune: “Are you aware that in an-
cient times, the sexual initiation of young
people by adults was not only encouraged,
it was considered a duty?”
In retrospect, these questions torture
Ms Springora. As angry as she is with Mr
Matzneff, she is almost more so with her
mother, who consulted her friends but “no
one, apparently, was particularly dis-
turbed.” In the 1970s there was a movement
in France to decriminalise sex between
adults and minors. Letters and petitions
signed by literary luminaries appeared in
Le Mondeand Libération. Paedophilia fea-
tures repeatedly in Mr Matzneff’s own nov-
els—including one later based on his rela-
tionship with Ms Springora—in which he
writes of his quest for “young meat”.
Paris éditeurs readily published his
work; he won literary prizes. Normality, in
this world, was grotesquely deformed. On-
ly later does Ms Springora see that, at 14,
“it’s not normal...to find yourself in his bed
at teatime with his penis in your mouth.”The old normal
It is precisely this emprisethat makes such
abuse so toxic. It flips the sense of guilt and
shame onto the victim, locks in the lies,
deepens suffering and silences complaint.
Ms Springora and Ms Kouchner struggled
for years to put the blame where it be-
longed. “Your silence is your responsibili-
ty,” Ms Kouchner’s mother tells her.
Might things now change? These booksare empowering a new generation. Thou-
sands of victims of incest have spoken out,
under the hashtag #MeTooInceste. The
public prosecutor has opened a criminal
investigation into Mr Duhamel; Victor has
pressed charges against him for the first
time. Mr Matzneff is under investigation
for rape of a minor (he has called the allega-
tions against him “unjust and excessive”).
President Emmanuel Macron, too, has
weighed in, promising that “these words,
these cries, nobody can ignore them any
longer.” A bill going through parliament
will criminalise any sexual relations with a
minor under 13 years, “consensual” or not.
But lawmakers have not yet agreed to
raise this to 15, the age at which sex is legal.
France may have found the words to talk
about its ghastly secrets, but not yet the le-
gal framework to stamp them out. Urban turmoilTales of the city
O
utsidethecity,fewpeoplehaveheard
of the “eight-day operation” mounted
in Lyari, a district of Karachi, in April 2012.
About 3,000 heavily armed policemen in
armoured personnel-carriers laid siege to
the area in a battle with local gangsters.
The electricity, gas and water were shut off.
The machine-gun and rocket fire were so
intense that leaving home was impossible.
On the eighth day, the police retreated,
their mission an unmitigated disaster,
with five officers dead and the official fig-
ure of 20 civilian casualties widely be-lieved to be a serious understatement.
It is far from the deadliest episode cov-
ered in “Karachi Vice”, a gripping account
of the city’s recent history by Samira Shack-
le, a British journalist whose mother was
born in the city. Violence and death recur
with sickening regularity. In December
2009 at least 43 people were killed when an
Ashura procession by Shia Muslims was
bombed by Sunni extremists, a blast fol-
lowed by the torching of over 3,000 shops.
In September 2012 hundreds died in a fire
at a textile factory. In 2014 the internation-
al airport was the scene of a pitched battle,
after it was invaded by terrorists from the
Pakistani Taliban. Besides these atrocities
the book is full of a steady stream of assas-
sinations, gangland murders and police
“encounters”—extra-judicial killings.
To make sense of this city of some 20m
inhabitants, Ms Shackle follows five char-
acters as they try to navigate it: an ambu-
lance-driver for Edhi, a huge charity; a
teacher-turned-development worker; a tel-
evision crime reporter; a social activist
whose organisation maps unofficial settle-
ments in an attempt to bring their resi-
dents some rights; and a young woman
from a village who defies her circumstanc-
es to stay at school until graduation.
From these personal stories emerges a
subtle portrait of Karachi’s overlapping
conflicts. Many are those of Pakistan as a
whole. Both have always been prey to eth-
nic and sectarian tension. Though Karachi
is in Sindh province, many among its pop-
ulation are not Sindhis but “Mohajirs”, Ur-
du-speakers who migrated from India at
the time of partition in 1947, or from East
Pakistan when it became Bangladesh in- And the Pushtun population has
grown this century as extremism and vio-
lence took root in Pakistan’s north-west,
where it blurs into Afghanistan, driving
many to seek refuge in Karachi, including
some of the violent extremists.
Unique to Karachi was the stranglehold
Karachi Vice. By Samira Shackle. Granta;
272 pages; £14.99Very mean streets