“What is happening these days forces us to speak so that more women can feel that other ways of facing the experience are also, not only possible, but frequent,” feminist activist and social educator Laura Macaya recently stated, according to the new known cases of sexual abuse and sexist harassment in Spain. In recent weeks, the proliferation of public complaints of this type, most of them through networks and informal communication spaces, has highlighted a hitherto hidden issue: the shared storylistening to and supporting women about their lived experiences is crucial to gradually ending the impunity of aggressors. The joint transmission of what was previously a reason for fear, shame or guilt has managed to channel all those feelings and radically transform them into sorora rage. And, most importantly, it has allowed women to know that they are not alone.
The writer and journalist has been demonstrating this for more than a year. Cristina You Will Fail since she turned her Instagram account into a repository where victims of sexual violence could make their stories public, anonymously. The testimony of the woman who suffered in her flesh the alleged repeated abuses of the now former deputy and former spokesperson for the Sumar Movement Íñigo Errejón They are just the tip of the iceberg of what this feminist network houses. Thousands and thousands of stories, most of them chilling, from survivors of sexual assault during childhood, adolescence and adulthood.
As Gisèle Pélicot revealed through her intentionally open-door trial, shame must change sidesand this has happened in recent weeks thanks to the increasingly massive and unstoppable public story. “I want to remember that all this began not with a complaint, but with a story,” Fallarás conveyed in this regard in a press conference last week.
“There is a paradigm shift, now we have less guilt, the fault that a woman suffers some type of harassment, aggression, is obviously not ours, no matter how much they have tried to sell us the don’t wear these clothes either don’t drink so much, don’t come back alone“, points to Public Sonia Herrera, political scientist specialized in political theory. Herrera recalls the case of Nevenka Fernández, the Ponferrada councilor who denounced the mayor of that city, Ismael Álvarez, for sexual harassment, and celebrates the steps achieved thanks to the overwhelming push of the feminist movement since then: “It was the first case of a woman denouncing a politician and No matter how much Nevenka won the trial, she was the one who had to leave the country and the one who was elected again years later was him,” he recalls.
Narrate ourselves collectively so that shame changes sides
The leader of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said this week that he is “concerned” that in Spain “it is easier to report on Instagram than in a police station.” However, in recent years, safe spaces for public denunciation have been created by the subordinates, which are not limited exclusively to the courts or police authorities and which have made it possible the sharing of everything that previously remained eternally in the shadows or was narrated from fear. Places that range from neighborhood feminist groups to platforms and social networks through the internet, where there is no personal judgment or questioning, nor revictimization, and for this very reason they facilitate the breaking of silence.
This has also occurred in two other cases of abuse reported in the last month. On the one hand, the photographer and director Silvia Grav, who denounced the sexual harassment on-line that the director Eduard Cortés had exerted on her when she was 19 years old and he was 55. This unleashed, in turn, a cascade of 25 testimonies from other women who, like her, had suffered sexual harassment by the filmmaker. On the other hand, the sharing by several victims of harassment by one of the founders of Ecologistas en Acción, Santiago Martín Barajas, which made it possible for one of them to finally decide to take the case to court.
“We have given a name to what we live, we have politicized it, we have organized ourselves and we have created alliances. We have many of our people telling us about it in the media, in political addresses, in novels, in social spaces and we have references“, indicates to this medium Yolanda Hidalgopolitical leader of the PCE of Getafe. The dissemination of feminist initiatives such as #tellit either #It’sOver They are perhaps the most palpable example of the social transformation that Spain has been experiencing in recent years.
These networks of support, narration and listening to testimonies between women are not new, They have historically existed informally in all types of contexts. They are found in all those groups of women who practice prostitution in Latin America, which have historically functioned to find collective support against the patriarchal and institutional violence they suffer daily, such as the Argentine collective Ammar. Also in the non-mixed feminist associations of universities, places of struggle and organization, but also of daily agreement from intersectionality. The change is that They are currently also permeating the digital space, expanding the scope of the stories and enabling experiential identification between women from very geographically distant environments.
The anthropologist and also an activist in the PCE Rut Mijarra emphasizes the notion of accompaniment that is derived from this entire network that is increasingly extensive every day of community testimonies: collective accompaniment. “Always taking into account the autonomous decision-making of the victim, the role of accompanying is to facilitate the person’s own healing, both at the individual and common level, since a process of truth, justice and reparation is necessary,” he alleges. . Therefore, he adds: “We have to continue creating safe environments, because security cannot be understood as the security forces and bodies understand it, but rather it is in the bodybuilding of which the Latin American feministsin it cuddlethat type of hug, but it has many more meanings, and in the community. “There’s security.”
Rethinking masculine dynamics from anti-punitivism
The direct consequence of this growing social change is none other than the majority demand, on the part of women, for a transformation of relational dynamics between men and women in all types of spaces: from workplaces to unions, political groups, families, companies, in sports, social movements and an endless list of environments. Dynamics that are born from a structural and socioculturally constructed inequality, the result of the power granted by gender.
The materialization of this change within mixed environments must flee, many activists say, from punitive approaches that exclusively pursue the condemnation of the aggressors. Not even the existence of anti-bullying protocols in companies and political formations seems sufficient to guarantee the eradication of sexist behavior if education and pedagogy are not placed at the center: “We have to enable the theoretical, political and subjective possibility so that, even having suffered very serious violence, we can understand each other from frameworks that go beyond pain and revenge,” estimates Lacaya in a recent article.
For his part, Mijarra alleges along the same lines that it is necessary to “understand that The aggressor is not a unique individual, but we are faced with a structural problem, that the aggressors can be brothers, fathers, known men and unknown men. Citizens need to assume that they are the aggressors and not the victims who must be questioned, so that they do not disappear. the violet dotsthat training courses continue to be given in primary, secondary, adult schools, at the university and above all that, that men catch the ball that is in their field,” he highlights.
Within the political spaces itself, Hidalgo establishes, “we have to move towards greater democratization of organizations and this not only implies voting or being represented, but also proposing changes and transformations in the redistribution of power, in the control of time. “It means reviewing the sexual division of organicity and also building other types of leadership that are much more collective.”
Of course, they point out, it is men who must carry out the work of pedagogy and reflection that is absolutely necessary for change: “They are the ones who have to become aware once and for all, do readings, hold assemblies, create study spaces, assume reproductive tasks, life support, care, etc.”, Mijarra emphasizes. Herrera, from the same perspective, maintains that women “we have already educated ourselves, we already know more and more that this has nothing to do with our actions. They need to be re-educated and know that they have to modify their dynamics. and the way of looking at and interacting with women.
It is not, therefore, about banishing the legal-legislative dimension that sanctions and penalizes, both at the state level and in the autonomous communities, sexual abuseespecially those perpetrated by those who hold positions of political or economic power and until now lived comfortably protected by their environment. The revolutionary lies, for many, in look at everyday gender dynamics rather than punishment and public lynching to tackle the problem of aggression from the roots. To do this, rethinking how to build another type of human relations in all areas starts from the word, from the verbalization (and, with it, its politicization and communitarization) of the violence suffered to end isolation. Without this language that materializes experiences, it would be impossible to problematize what happens to women within the patriarchal system.
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