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

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Understandably, considering the sheer horror of the case of Dominique Pelicot, the Frenchman who drugged his wife with sleeping pills over a ten-year period and filmed dozens of men he met via the internet raping her, most comments have come from women.

Indeed, like many men, I am wary about sticking my head above the parapet to talk about such heinous crimes committed by people of my own gender.

For the great risk is that any attempt will be met by the observation that men can never comprehend what it is like to be the victim of a sex attack.

That said, I feel it is important for men to join the debate. Otherwise, there is a danger that society as a whole fails to get to the root causes of the problem and thus fails to reach any possible solutions.

‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,’ Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch, accompanying many a 1970s feminist battle-cry that ‘All men are rapists’.

Indeed, it is hard to argue with that sentiment, given the ordinariness of those 50 convicted in a French court last week, who included a fireman, a lorry driver, a soldier, a roof tiler, a nurse and a DJ. The case suggested that all men nurse dark predations in their heart and are capable of doing as the Pelicot men did.

Dominique Pelicot was jailed last week for fiming dozens of men raping his comatose wife

What else could possibly have driven the ‘Monster of Mazan’ – who scrawled ‘submissive bitch’ on his comatose wife, as she lay prone to each rapist – than a hatred of women?

Sadly, sex attacks happen in every country. And every country has different ways of tackling such crimes.

Some (China, Afghanistan, Iran, 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 imprisonment of up to ten years.

In Norway, the minimum sentence is three years in jail.

Castration is sometimes a punishment. In some American states, shorter sentences are allowed for sex criminals who agree to voluntary chemical castration.

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

Such voluntary schemes have already been piloted in some prisons in England and Scotland. They involve the prisoner, in return for early release, agreeing to take drugs that lower their testosterone levels to those of a pre-pubescent boy, reducing their desire to commit heinous acts.

The Italian government, under the country’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has announced its intention to introduce voluntary chemical castration for rapists and paedophiles

That the pilot schemes have not been followed up in British jails suggests that the results from the few institutions that took part in trials from the early 2010s were mixed at best. Chemical castration relies on the criminal continuing treatment outside prison, be it taking pills daily or submitting to an injection every six months.

My wife, Carla, is the mother of our six children (three boys and three girls). Though Left-wing on many issues such as wars and migration, on this subject she goes even further than Meloni.

With regard to the Pelicot case, she says: ‘All the attackers should be castrated. Not just chemically – but surgically. Everything off! Whoever does such things to a woman, who’s been drugged, is disgusting.’

Carla is a devout Catholic and believes in mercy and the forgiveness of sins. Here, though, she surely speaks for many people, men as well as women.

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

Predictably, under pressure from human rights lawyers who regarded the practice as ‘torture’ and ‘degrading’, Germany stopped surgical castration in 2017.

There is a great irony, of course, that while many activists on the Left oppose voluntary chemical castration for rapists and paedophiles, they approve of similar hormone therapy treatments for teenagers wanting to change sex.

But where Germany fears to tread, the US state of Louisiana has no such compunctions. In June, its Republican governor announced that judges can order offenders guilty of certain sex crimes against children to undergo surgical castration.

And this is where I agree with my wife. Men such as Pelicot, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison, should be castrated, not just voluntarily as part of some imagined cure, but surgically, in order to deter others and above all to punish. To humiliate.

It is surely wrong to regard rape or paedophilia as an illness that can be cured, rather than a crime that must be punished.

But that does not explain why ordinary men commit such atrocious crimes against women. Pornography is a possible explanation – but surely the real cause is the brutalised attitudes of some men.

Gisele Pelicot, who waived her right to anonymity, arrives to hear the verdict on her husband at a court in Avignon, France, last week

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

Machismo. Or what many on the Left call ‘patriarchy’.

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

But the trouble is, we don’t live in a patriarchy any more. Unless you count certain extreme Muslim societies – or, in Italy, the Mafia.

These days, macho men feel 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’ rather than a sense of superiority.

This was in response to a horrific murder trial in Italy that has provoked much national reflection as has Pelicot in France.

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

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

She is right that a loss of cultural and social dominance is lighting a wicked fuse in some men, a disturbing number of whom appear otherwise ‘normal’.

And given that equality of the sexes is here to stay in Western society, there is no easy solution, nor quite possibly is there any solution. A malignancy like this might only be able to be mitigated.

This is where forced castration can play its role, as a tool in averting further sex crimes from the most twisted individuals and as a deterrent, such would be the humiliation to men such as the monsters of Mazan.