The student enters the rectory door stunned and anguished on a long weekend Friday in the middle of winter. In his last memory he sees himself leaving the house the night before. You have woken up in a strange place, with a horrible feeling. He says that they put something in his glass and that he has been the victim of a sexual assault. Magdalena Suárez, director of the Complutense Equality Unit, and Isabel Tajahuerce, delegate of the rector for Equality, listen to her from the same white table where they explain the episode two years later. “We had no tools to help her at the time, we had to turn to a private psychologist. We realized that we needed immediate attention ”, explains Tajahuerce. From that anguished afternoon the germ of the psychological care device emerged: two specialists who attend to any request.
The service can be used by any member of the huge Complutense community, the largest face-to-face campus in Spain, which encompasses 80,000 people including students, professors and administration staff, a population as large as Pontevedra or Manresa. The University’s anti-bullying protocol allows them to open a file and follow up on cases whenever they occur on campus and with their staff. But in sexual assaults, such as the one suffered by the girl with whom this report begins, they can only accompany them: it is the victims who must report them to the police or to the courts. That student did. From the Complutense they offered him support. Time has shown that that first care was crucial for her recovery: “She is much better now and leads a normal life,” says Magdalena Suárez.
70 complaints for the anti-bullying protocol
In the last five years, the Equality Unit has handled 70 complaints with the first and last names of the anti-bullying protocol and a similar number of “alert cases”: people who demand justice, but do not want to get involved in writing. Without a name and without a complaint, the cases cannot be followed, however the door is always open for psychological attention. And it is through that door that they have discovered an issue that worries them but in which they can do nothing more than accompany and raise awareness because it is a purely police issue: sexual assaults that occur within groups of supposed friends, of boys to girls of the same gang on a night out. “They are attacks that they do not identify as such, because they are people with whom they have a bond, close people, but it is quite common among young people. These cases come to us and we have to refer them to specialized resources, we can only provide accompaniment. It is very serious that there are young women with training who are not identifying violence against them. Some come many months later because their friends have shown it to them, ”says Tajahuerce.
There is no police data to gauge the scope of these gang attacks, confirms a police spokesman. But it is a reality that works such as the 2019 Macro-survey on Violence against Women prepared by the Ministry of Equality, the latest available: 49% of sexual violence suffered by women – from touching to rape – comes from friends. or acquaintances; and 21.6% of relatives.
“They have led us to believe that the rapes occur at night, in a dark alley and by a stranger, and most of the time it is not like that,” sums up Clara Barceló, a student in the last year of Journalism at the Complutense and promoter of the association. University feminist Scila, who was born in 2017 in the heat of social unrest due to the case of the group sexual assault of La Manada in Pamplona. They became 20 very active women, capable of concentrating 150 people in an assembly. They opened a mailbox to receive anonymous complaints, although most of them reached them orally: “This has happened to my friend …”. He estimates that they knew between 10 and 15 cases a year, the majority of harassment. They were referred to the unit. The future journalist does not know of cases of aggression between friends, but it does not surprise her. The first step for the stunned victim is to tell someone close to them what has happened. Complaints are always more complex: almost 89% of cases of sexual violence are never reported, it also reflects the macro-survey of violence against women.
“The complainants usually wait until they do not have to meet with that person again, that is why we receive more cases at the end of the course,” explains one of the psychologists of the Complutense specialized device, who asks to leave without a name to protect the women. victims. They affirm that they can receive between one and three consultations a week, but there is still no closed data on how many cases they have attended because the device has been in operation for less than a year and they are now preparing their first annual report. “They find it difficult to report because they tend to take responsibility for what happened and the feeling of guilt works as a way of making sense of what has happened and experiencing a certain control over the situation, they think that if the responsibility is theirs it will not happen again. They can be people with whom they have a previous bond and an image already formed, some aggressors even have a feminist discourse. In this sense, it is something quite traumatic, as if all the rules of the game were broken. If someone is in a similar situation, I would tell them that it is not their fault, and I would encourage them to share what happened to them with someone close to them ”.
The equality unit launched in January 2017, with the previous government team, a protocol that focuses on cases of sexist (discrimination based on gender), sexual or sexual orientation (homophobia) harassment. The cases open so far are varied and on many occasions they come together for different reasons, such as sexual and sexist harassment. They register from workplace harassment a woman who raises her son or daughter alone (the most common figure of the so-called single-parent family) who repeatedly has to teach at eight o’clock at night, to anonymous emails sent to a long distribution list in those who falsely accuse a homosexual person of harassment. During the toughest months of the pandemic, say those responsible for the unit, cyberbullying increased.
All public universities have equality units, which are mandatory since the 2007 university law, and “most” also have anti-bullying protocols, although each campus has developed it in its own way, explains Magdalena Suárez, who in addition to being At Complutense, she is secretary of the executive committee of the network of gender equality units in universities, Ruigeu. They are preparing a report with the exact number of protocols. “Most of them find harassment cases similar to the ones we handle here,” adds Suárez.
In cases of vertical harassment – usually from a teacher to the student or doctoral student – the situation is more complicated to manage because there is a power relationship, and the victim fears reprisals. The psychologist explains that the environment “can be very intimidating for students, especially when they meet an eminence in their field who is also very clever, very intelligent. They tell us that they don’t know how to act and this has a huge psychological repercussion ”. In those cases, the professional believes that it is important to dismantle this figure: “It is very difficult for us to think that a person considered as an excellence does not have the same development in all areas of his life. It is difficult to differentiate between author and work. By inertia, we think that someone has to be just as brilliant in all areas of their existence and it is not always like that ”.
No sanction capacity
The equality unit does not have the capacity to sanction and that, Suárez is indignant, makes many at the university believe that they are useless. Harassment cases in which there is a crime are transferred to the prosecution and in the rest a report is issued that goes to the inspection of services – dependent on the legal department – which begins the administrative procedure again based on this initial document. In the last case, the rector sanctions. Suárez regrets that opening a new procedure revictimizes the person attacked, who has to testify again, and puts the aggressor on notice. And to his regret he adds a wish: “The woman who makes the complaint may never find out what is happening, if the person who assaulted her has been punished … The procedure requires this. That is why we ask the Ministry of Universities for a single procedure because equality units are under pressure because we do not have full powers and we cannot go to the end ”.
Courses against chemical submission
The unit is preparing a guide on harassment and another on chemical submission and has organized two courses on drugs that inhibit victims. Gabriela Peña, president of the Humanization Commission of the Infanta Leonor Hospital in Madrid, speaks in them, who recalls that submission has always existed: “The boys who tried to get the girls drunk so that they would say Yes easily”. But with the rise of the Internet, he says, since 2015 it is easier to access disabling drugs. In their hospital they see between three and five cases of submissions a month (one in three, from the Burundanga media). They are always unknown assailants, in a party atmosphere, and the problem is that the remains in blood barely last two or three hours. Dr. Peña encourages the girls to report and is happy to see that younger doctors are aware of these problems.
In the courses, Peña distinguishes between two types of submission: directly drugging older people to rob them or taking advantage of a playful situation with alcohol to supply specific drugs. It informs the university students about the different substances used (barbiturates, analgesics-anesthetics, cocaine …) and teaches them to distinguish the symptoms: hallucinations, memory loss, an excessive hangover, nudity or fluids in clothing or on the body. In addition to female students, the unit’s workers have come to learn how to act and accompany the victim from the beginning.
#Sexual #violence #university #rapes #friends #refer