In 1977, dozens of prominent French writers and intellectuals — including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, and Gabriel Matzneff — signed an open letter protesting the prolonged pre-trial detention of three men accused of sexually assaulting a group of underage girls. The letter noted that the girls in question “were not victims of the slightest violence, but, on the contrary, clarified to the investigating judges that they consented (despite the fact that French law denies them the right to consent).” It went on to question why the justice system “recognized the capacity of discernment in a minor of 13 or 14 years when being judged and condemned, only to be denied this capacity when it comes to sex and their intimate life.” The letter ended, rather mordantly: “Three years for caresses and kisses, that’s enough.” In Neige Sinno’s prizewinning novel Sad Tiger, which recounts in thorough and relentless detail the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her stepfather, the French author argues that what everyone wants to know is what goes through the head of a pedophile.“ With the victims,” Sinno writes, “it’s easy, we can all put ourselves in their shoes. Even if you've not experienced it, the bewilderment, the silence of the victim is something we can all imagine, or think we can. The perpetrator, on the other hand, that's something else.”