The first time I saw a penis I was about eight years old. I was on my way to school with my neighbors when an old man came up to us and exposed himself to us. We ran terrified and scared and once in class and without really knowing why, I started to cry. At that moment, none of us knew how to explain what had just happened to us and, above all, why we felt so much fear, disgust and shame. A few years later, when I was a teenager, a guy in his thirties I was talking to at a nightclub grabbed my arm and tried to drag me out. I never knew how I managed to get rid of him, because I panicked, convinced that he was going to kill me, I only knew that I had to escape from there no matter what. I took refuge in my room for days completely scared and ashamed. Already at the University I became an expert contortionist to avoid unwanted hugs and I also learned not to close the doors of some offices or to enter them whenever I could accompanied – or be the companion – of a colleague.
In none of these specific cases – and I am only telling you the ones that affected me the most – did I file a report with the police. Exhibitionists were a species that abounded in parks and streets near schools when I was little and the solution was usually found in talking to your older brother or a friend’s older brother, so that he would take charge. Very few of us dared to tell or talk about these things with the adults in our families, because the shame and the feeling that, somehow, they would end up blaming us, outweighed the fear of crossing paths with them again. This made me avoid telling what had happened to me in that nightclub for years, it took a long time until I understood that it had not been my responsibility, and yet, as I write about it, I can’t help but feel ashamed. As for the University, it was enough to see how some people walked around confidently to understand that the campus was tolerated as the private hunting ground of some privileged people, so it was more effective to build networks of mutual aid and warning among the companions in a Spain in which victims were forced to leave the country while he went out into the street to defend the harassers. I only went to the police once, it was one morning when, as I was leaving the gym, a man started following me in his car while he masturbated. The response of the police officer who answered the phone consisted of telling me to calm down and recommending that I go home. Since I had no desire to let the guy who was harassing me know where I lived, I took refuge in a coffee shop until my father came by car to pick me up.
When the “Errejón case” broke out last week, these memories hit me again. And I felt fear, disgust and anger again, but above all, that eternal shame that women carry, this mental burden of always thinking of ourselves as guilty or responsible for the (bad) things they do to us. And I got angry, but this time it wasn’t with me because I hadn’t been more skillful or more cautious or more emphatic. I got angry with Errejón but also with all those who over the years have harassed me, touched me without my consent, pressured me and insulted me when I have said no, rubbed against me on a bus or shouted obscenities in the street… It’s over, I thought, it’s time for them to be the ones who feel the shame, the questioning and the pointing out, for them to be the ones who face once and for all the consequences of their actions and the way they treat women. Let them pay. And so, and despite the shock – the symbolic weight of the fact that the accused is one of the prominent protagonists in the political chronicle of the last decade is not negligible – many women understood that what was happening, what was being denounced, was not It did more than confirm what feminism has been saying for decades: that machismo and patriarchal behavior permeate the entire society regardless of ideologies, social class and gender, and that there are no safe spaces for women.
Women are not safe either at home, or on the street, or in political parties, or in unions, or in study or work centers, or on social networks, but also not in police stations or courts. And pointing out the latter does not imply that feminism discourages women from judicially denouncing their aggressors, since in a rule of law only through this means can justice be done and reparations made to the victims. But what we cannot do either is be blind to the fact that the judicial system and many of its protocols re-victimize women who feel questioned and violated in processes in which human beings with their own biases participate and that these, in Sometimes, they outweigh the laws themselves. So it should not surprise us that many women believe that they will feel safer if they resort to anonymity or seek the support and sisterhood that social networks can provide when denouncing their aggressors or telling their experiences. For this reason, instead of judging women who distrust or fear the judicial process, we should strive to make police stations and courts safer and more humane spaces for women without endangering the presumption of innocence of the accused. and respect for due process. But at the same time it would be naive, if not reckless, to think that social networks can replace or replace judicial channels, because beyond the dangerous implications – ethical, legal – of setting up public cases that ignore the rule of law, The testimonies that many women share on social networks can end up being distorted or exploited both politically and economically, serving spurious interests or personal vendettas that have nothing to do with our well-being or security. In networks, victims are also exposed to the risk of attacks from other users and no virtual account, no matter how well-intentioned, can provide the psychological and legal advice, support, legal assistance or follow-up necessary for the comprehensive protection of victims. the victims. Only administrations and public institutions can – and must – do so.
At first the “Errejón case” threatened to finally become a general cause. An opportunity to maturely address the debate on how we continue to protect patriarchal and abusive behavior, especially in the private sphere, where the law of silence that protects sexists and abusers still operates. This was the perfect moment to denounce that political parties, also those on the left and those that claim to put feminism at the center, cannot be safe spaces for women because they replicate the forms of patriarchy by being highly hierarchical organizations in which They promote hyper-leadership of hegemonic masculinities, egos, careerism, loyalty to acronyms over people, and electoral calculation as the supreme good. However, partisan interests have once again been put before the well-being of women to turn everything that happened with Errejón into ammunition in the suicidal civil war waged by the Spanish left, silencing and canceling the rest of the debates.
While feminists question power relations and debate sexual freedom and patriarchal violence, the dangers of infantilizing women and ignoring the advances and empowerment that we have been acquiring thanks to the feminist struggle; While we discuss the need for abusers – regardless of whether or not their abuses are contemplated in the Penal Code – to assume public and social responsibilities for their actions without falling into reactionary punitivism, the political class and the hegemonic press have put the focus once again on the victims: on why they have taken so long to report or on the way in which they have decided to do so. In this way the “Errejón case” can be presented once again, for your relief and tranquility, as an isolated case, as something exceptional and not as the symptom of a serious illness: that of the different faces and forms of violence that take the machismo and patriarchy that crosses and conditions us as a society and as individuals. The mere fact that Iñigo Errejón himself has had the cynicism and hard face to present himself as a victim of both only proves us right.
#safe #places #women #lessons #Errejón #case
