MeToo
at the university

More than 25 female lecturers and researchers from Spanish public universities break their silence for the first time to denounce the harassment and sexist violence they have suffered in an institution that boasts about seeking excellence but still retains part of the "feudal" DNA.

If you are still afraid, I promise to give you a good spank". "Sex is an excellent form of communication". "My life is an orgasm, girl!". "Wet kisses". "Little kisses there". Each of these messages, and a good handful more, were sent with absolute impunity by a renowned Professor at the University of Barcelona to 12 female and two male students. All of them are recorded in proceedings that the prosecutor's office closed the file on in 2013. The complaint of sexual harassment, after being conveniently burnt down in the offices of the university, had already prescribed when it reached its hands. The case, therefore, did not go to court, but it has helped to uncover a dark and long-silenced septic tank: the sexual and sexist harassment suffered by female university professors and researchers, which causes suffering, as well as suffocation and the expulsion of talent.

One of the complainants was sociologist Ana Vidu, whose case is still extraordinary insofar as it broke the university wall. However, the outcome is all too familiar to too many women. Vidu became "the conflictive one", the outcast, the crazy one, adjectives that still have repercussions in her professional life today. "It's worse when you report than when you suffer harassment", she says today, from UC Berkeley. In fact, with her career smashed in Barcelona, she opted for the University of Deusto, where the dean of Law, after a long interview, admitted that she was "impressed" by the "amount of slander about Vidu that had reached her". And the Professor? Well, he was removed from teaching, but not from the institution.

90% of female teachers and researchers do not report harassment cases

Vidu is now part of this first big MeToo in Spanish universities. Like her, the more than 25 female academics who appear in this report put faces and stories to what the few investigations carried out on this issue have been saying: that the same academic life that speaks of excellence and critical thinking is also based on a plot of sexist violence that feeds on the hierarchy of the institution, on its great competitiveness and on the so-called isolating or second-order violence: that suffered by the people who support those affected.

It is not so much that the university is full of harassers, as that its ecosystem has traditionally provided impunity to those who exist. ‘Omertá’, the law of silence, continues to be one of the most heard words in this great mosaic of university harassment.

Practically all universities have internal complaints. The fact that their names do not appear in this report does not mean that they have eradicated this type of violence. The confusion, however, makes its way when trying to map the phenomenon.

First, because the line between ‘simply’ harassment at work and gender harassment at work is sometimes fine -although there are clarifying data: from December 2019 to March 2021, 31 women per 11 men filed complaints to the Harassment Office of the University of Granada-. And then there is the fact that the absence of a single regulation in terms of data collection criteria makes it impossible to discern in many centers how many reports or complaints come from faculty, students or administrative and services staff (PAS). Of course, the bulk belong to the student body, which is the largest. But it is in the teaching and research staff sector where the stakes are highest and the fear of reprisals is most immobilizing.

"90% of lecturers and researchers do not report cases of harassment", says Patricia Melgar, a member of the Community of Research on Excellence for All (CREA), the research network that has worked on this issue. Its deputy director, Professor Rosa Valls, already pointed out in a pioneering study in 2008 that up to 65% of university students had experienced or knew of a situation of gender violence in the areas of students, teaching/research or PAS.

At the time, this report succeeded in a/ getting the law to consider universities as spaces of gender violence and b/ contributed to the creation of Equality Units. "The universities had never been willing to open up this issue, but they were forced to do so from above", she says. From then on, the data in the study have not been updated, even though they have requested it up to three times from the State Research Agency. 

The abuses range from groping to butlering, denial of resources, 'fixes' in the evaluation committees, defamation, gaslighting and physical assaults

While the figures remain in limbo, the accounts of the female academics interviewed, some of them with open legal proceedings against the university itself, compose instead a muted common tune. Some, like Ana Vidu, have suffered sexual harassment (research suggests that about 1% of Professors are repeated harassers). And others, like Carme Ruestes, PhD in History, claim to have lived, in her case at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, as "servants in a regime of serfdom": "The Professor did not want to support me in the competition for the position of Professor, but he proposed that I stay doing research for him; for many years I worked hard and under pressure".  

In this account of dirty laundry - in which the outrages range from touching to denial of resources and information, butlering, expulsion maneuvers, "fixes" in the evaluation committees, defamation campaigns, theft of material, gaslighting and even threats and physical aggressions - there are also lecturers who denounce harassment linked to their origin ("certain behaviors would not have occurred if I were not a woman and Latin American -explains a lecturer at the University of Granada-, the combination of being a woman and an immigrant is explosive, I am the intruder in this feudal institution") and sexual orientation.

A University of Barcelona lecturer who denounced her Professor for harassment and gaslighting claims that -after having accepted mediation- not only has the damage inflicted not been repaired. In addition, a "kind of collective permission" to belittle her has been reinforced, which, according to her, is not unrelated to her sexual orientation. "Even though society thinks it is very advanced, when you don't have a heteronormative sexual orientation, you are marginalized, you become the discordant note", she says.

One of the main paralyzing factors when it comes to denouncing and even supporting victims is precisely that alliance sealed by fear and hierarchy. "Above all, don't put my name", "please don't write this down", "I'm very afraid of reprisals", "make sure I'm not identified", are comments that punctuate conversations with some of those affected (most of those who appear in this report no longer work in the centers where they suffered harassment).

There is no clear profile of the harasser, beyond the fact that they have "power, protection and connections", and that they move "through networks of favors and counter-favors"

As for the harassers, there is no clear profile, beyond the fact that they possess "power, protection and connections in, for example, evaluation committees for certain positions", says sociologist Ana Vidu. "They move very well through the darkness, through networks of favors and counter-favors", adds biologist Eva Bussalleu. Pregnant and depressed after having suffered denial of resources and information - extremes recognized by the University of Girona itself - she lost in a competition the position that was supposed to consolidate her -to the colleague she had internally accused of harassment-, and which will have to be repeated because the court ruled that the committee did not have parity of representation.

The medieval references in this report are not metaphorical. Universities were a creation of the 12th century. They were strictly male institutions, where the level of misogyny was even higher than that of the clergy. In the 21st century, dependence on the protection of a Professor for career advancement is equal to the serfdom to the feudal lord of the Middle Ages.

Since the implementation of protocols in universities, harassment has been attenuated

This feudal DNA determines the relationships between people and favors gender, race and class inequality, to the point that Rosa Valls states that "in general, a company is more humane than the university itself". According to a report by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) published in 2018, more than 50% of female lecturers have suffered gender-based harassment. The book 'Harassment. #MeToo in Spanish science', by Ángela Bernardo, collects data and studies at state and international level that clash with the idealized image of academia. According to Bernardo, the journal 'Personnel Psychology' stated in 2003 that, in the US, the Army and the academy, due to their extremely hierarchical nature, are the sectors where there would be more male harassment.

Despite the introduction of meritocratic mechanisms in recent years, senior lecturers and especially Professors are still key in what happens in their feudal domain, from the composition of the committees that settle the positions to the allocation of resources, the allocation of subjects and schedules, or the publications that are made. According to a 2019 report by the Xarxa Vives (network which brings together 22 universities in Catalan-speaking territories), only two out of every 10 Professors are women. Until recently, this gulf was attributed more to circumstances such as motherhood than to the misogynistic nature of the academic institution.

"It is a very hierarchical and competitive framework and it seems that you have to do a sea of favors to keep your place. Who is going to denounce their thesis director? We are in a knowledge factory and we should not pay obedience to a Professor, but it is done and a lot. It's feudal law," says Rosa Cerarols, director of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra's Equality Unit.

"It is a very hierarchical framework and it seems that you have to do a lot of favors to keep your position ¿Who is going to denounce their thesis director?", according to the Equality Unit of Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Precisely the Equality Units, launched in recent years, have an ambivalent balance. On the one hand, says Professor Rosa Valls, they have meant "a super important political impact" and a firewall to start working with. In fact, it is considered that since the implementation of the protocols, harassment has been attenuated. Especially sexual harassment: before 2004, 22% of associates, interns and trainees had suffered it, compared to 4% today. Even so, warns the Professor, Equality Committees and Units also run the risk of becoming "flower vases".

Their main handicaps? They are run by the rector's team, so if the institution chooses to protect itself, they turn against the victims; the mediation processes they promote revictimize the complainants; the protocols are often dissuasive, and some bad experiences scare away victims who are considering taking the step. "When I went to the unit, they told me that I was very brave and that from now on I would no longer be alone, but I totally regret having filed the complaint and trusted their words", says a University of Barcelona lecturer who, after reporting her Professor in 2019 for harassment and slander sustained over 10 years (inside and outside the university) not only went through a traumatic and useless mediation, but the process accentuated her isolation in an area in which she is the only woman.

"My peers turned their faces away from me, I was marginalized, I was not taken into account at all - she continues. I believe that many have privileges that they are afraid of losing. The university is a medieval institution and they don't want to stop being knights of the round table. Anyone who they think challenges them becomes someone who can be ridiculed, questioned and killed in life, and that's what they've been doing to me since day one. At best, they have looked the other way and left me alone, like an outcast".

The siege reported by this lecturer is no exception. In fact, in the modus operandi of university harassment, the cordon sanitaire around the victim is significant, in which the faculty 'buys' the version of the harasser, for survival, indolence or interest. Vidu explains that professors who had praised her talent began to question her in public. The management of the university school where J.R. worked did not want to hear her experience and in the end opened an internal investigation behind closed doors carried out by an external company that made reports in the framework of occupational risk prevention. In neither case was there any willingness to clarify the situation or any support.

"I received death threats and they tried to kick me out of the university," explains Ramon Flecha, University of Barcelona Professor who supported a harassed student

"One of the first cases to hit the press was that of M.A.F., an interim lecturer at the University of Barcelona School of Economics, who, after the reports of the Public Prosecutor's Office and the judiciary, lost her case against full professor M.A., whom she denounced in 2004 for pressuring her to agree to sexual favors, because members of her department testified in favor of the Professor", explains Ramon Flecha, the first Spanish Professor who sided with the victims, an 'honor' that turned him into a "traitor" and brought him a substantial drop in income.

In 1995, Flecha filed the first complaint at the University of Barcelona, proposing to the rector's team to act against the continuous situations of sexual harassment and to adopt procedures like Harvard's, "where if a lecturer knows about harassment and does not report it, he or she is expelled". The retaliation was "brutal", he describes. "I received death threats at three in the morning, they tried to kick me out of the university, like other colleagues who investigated the matter, and when they saw they couldn't take us down, they went after our children in the schools", he explains. Who? "There was a total involvement of the university structure", the researcher, an example of a victim of second-order violence, has no doubt -only 0.4% of teachers support the victims and of this 0.4%, 80% have suffered isolating gender violence-, a key without which harassment in the university environment could not be understood and which, in a pioneering way, was included in the Catalan legal system in December 2020.

"Victims can only become 'survivors' if they find support, and this support is only given, with heroic exceptions, with legislation and decisive institutional actions. Without them, the law of silence, an ally of the harassers, is imposed", he explains. In this sense, Valls affirms that a key concept is the so-called 'bystander intervention' or witness intervention. "When society intervenes, when you see something in the subway and you think you should intercede, that's when the programs work because isolating violence no longer occurs".

Victims can only become 'survivors' if they find support. Otherwise, the law of silence wins

Meanwhile, the psychological after-effects of harassment are fierce. Some of the women interviewed suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which affects their daily lives and forces them to pay for psychologists specialized in conflicts in the workplace to try to mitigate the effects of harassment. Their accounts speak of concentration problems, tremors, insomnia, dizziness, anxiety attacks, depression and even suicide attempts. "I fell into a very deep depression and once even tried to throw myself out of a window - explains one researcher -. Now it seems barbaric to me, but I was very confused and I just wanted to end the suffering that was consuming me".

In fact, many times, the conflict erupts after suffering harassment for a long time. At first, many of those affected do not understand what is happening. And then they see no apparent way out of the web. "It took me 10 years to report it. You hold on until you can't take it anymore. Nobody makes a decision like that when they have been making your life impossible for seven months", says a professor. "I only took the step of denouncing when I saw that I could no longer lose anything else", explains Eva Bussalleu, who has been hired again and will apply for a new competition after the courts annulled the previous one.

The great incriminating evidence all these women make up is there. What to do with it? Judicial processes only serve for the most serious cases, are costly and require evidence that the victims have not always been able to collect. So the change, according to those affected and the studies, must be above all institutional and cultural. In this sense, from the Equality Unit of the University of Barcelona they proclaim "zero tolerance". “We will go all out," they say, "and if there are cases from the past that need to be reopened, we will do so". Those affected, for their part, are wary of real change, demand political intervention if the universities do not tackle the problem and demand restorative justice to restore their honor.

Some suffer post-traumatic stress disorder and must pay out of pocket for psychological care

"The harassment is still systemic and so is the lack of response, I only hope that effective measures will be taken and that all this injustice and suffering will serve a purpose, that new generations will not have to go through the same thing - says Eva Bussalleu - . Defending myself has cost me too much time, health and money, when I should have devoted all my energy to research and teaching".

Making the magnitude of the problem visible, measuring and understanding it is a first step, legislation is essential, and more information and awareness campaigns are needed. But also, crucial to minimize gender-based harassment in academia is that society stops tolerating it. MeToo and mutual support networks are key to building a culture of support for victims.

A new literary genre has even been born, derived from the need to publicize situations of harassment without exposing oneself to denunciations. The 'Omertá' section from 'Diario Feminista' has published more than 90 chapters: "We always take a chance -explains one of the authors, Mar Joanpere-. We have received lawsuits for the right to honor for denouncing harassment, although the names never appear, except those that the justice system has identified as such". Writing so that everything is understood but without identifying the protagonists has resulted in very similar texts that emerge as patterns of harassment.

"Harassment is systemic and the lack of response, too", laments researcher Eva Bussalleu, with a trial pending

Mar Joanpere was a victim of sexual harassment when she was a master's student at the University of Barcelona and is part of the Solidarity Network of Gender Violence in Universities. Today she is a lecturer in Sociology at the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona: "Many people who were harassed as students have left the University of Barcelona. We were victims, survivors and now activists. But we have to stay in the academy because we will only change it from within".

This article was published in en EL PERIÓDICO in January 2022

Texts: Núria Marrón, Núria Navarro and Gemma Tramullas
Multimedia coordination: Rafa Julve

*If you consider it appropriate to send us any experience of harassment or male violence in the academic environment, please write to cuaderno@elperiodico.com