These days we have talked and reflected on collective responsibility in the face of sexist abuse and we have heard many times – most of them, with the best intentions – that we must report, but the reality is that reporting is not easy and many times it is not even possible.
When I first spoke to Sara it was late at night, we were both tired. I noticed a slight tremor in her voice as she launched into the first tirade she had prepared when she knew I was going to call her. I understood why he tried to tone down the most gruesome details of his story with a sigh, an attempt at laughter, or a punchline in a slightly lower tone: “Now I’m embarrassed but then…”.
Another thing she said at the beginning of the conversation is that she had never thought about reporting what happened to her with Iñigo Errejón, that she knew she would be questioned for having agreed to certain requests, that she had blamed herself for not having been able to get out of that situation sooner.
Talking about it, putting words to the trauma, often means forgiving yourself. It is a reparation to claim one’s own recovered will, to recognize the wounds to close them. Sharing it, Sara explains, means putting a double mirror before society. One that reflects that abuse and mistreatment are much more present than we want to believe, and another in which women can recognize that no one is safe from falling into the traps that exploit this certainty: we have been socialized to please, to to please, to seek validation from the male gaze. And although we rebel against that, we sometimes get entangled in “very subtle and complicated strategies to recognize,” as sexual violence expert Bárbara Tardón described them. “There is a lot of exercise of power and that ends up trapping the victim like a net,” he explained in this article.
“Sometimes I have realized very late that someone has committed physical abuse on me,” actress Vicky Luengo, star of Prima faciea monologue by Suzie Miller in which she plays a criminal lawyer who suffers a rape.
The protagonist is aware – from her own professional experience – that her case is going to be questioned, that she is not the ‘perfect victim’, that she has said and done things that will lead her to be questioned, and she debates whether or not she should report. “We all understand what it’s like to be raped on the street, but not when someone commits physical abuse on you on a more intimate level, for example. There is no woman who is not crossed by this story,” Luengo analyzed.
These days we have talked and reflected on collective responsibility in the face of sexist abuses and we have heard many times – most of them, with the best intentions – that we must report, that there is a lack of complaints, that judicial processes are guarantees and constitute the only way to put an end to this type of behavior. The reality is that reporting is not easy and many times it is not even possible. There are facts that most likely will not be criminally charged but that are equally serious and reprehensible.
In 2020 Belén López Peiró published Why did you come back every summer?a book in which she recounted the sexual abuse suffered by her uncle for years on vacations she spent at his house. “I realized over time that the question they asked me was not a question. It wasn’t, ‘Why did you come back every summer?’ to try to understand the process. It was a statement: because you came back, they abused you,” explained López Peiró when talking about his case. “Most of the questions were accusations or they were justifications. That is also structural,” the writer reflected.
The story (and the judicial complaint) dynamited her family and exposed her to discredit and alienation from her own loved ones. The book mixes the voices of her parents, her cousins, the professionals who cared for her, the lawyers… This polyphonic structure, López Peiró explained, allows “to challenge each person who reads it, be it the co-worker, the friend, the mother of a friend… anyone who is part of that society that makes it possible for silence to remain.”
The judicial complaint against Errejón and Sara’s story in elDiario.es put us in front of an uncomfortable gray scale but at the same time they throw a certainty in our face: some of the wounds that live hidden or have not gone beyond the confession between friends, they have exposed themselves publicly. It has been difficult for these women to recover their voice to be able to raise it, even recognizing that they did not do what, from their perspective now, they would like to have done then.
If we put our eyes on them, let it be to try to understand, to question ourselves, as López Peiró says, as agents of that silence that they have dared to break. If we want to look at something, let it first be what we considered normal or impossible to change for too long. If we want to question something, let it be our prejudices, let it be this order that we have given ourselves. If we need to focus on something, let it be on that collective wound that – when reading so many messages that attack and question – seems so difficult to close.
#perfect #victim #shut
