“This has not been any surprise in the Faculty. There was proof of rumors persistent and extended enough for the complute to have done something before. ” The expert in protocols against harassment in universities and a member of the Violet Point of Somosaguas, Paula Martín Peláez, about the case of Juan Carlos Monedero. Somosaguas is the campus to which the Faculty of Policies of the Complutense University of Madrid belongs where the expolitic has taught since 1992.
The Complutense has now opened a file to Juan Carlos Monedero after the official complaint filed against him by a student. However, several women who have gone through that faculty report that “everyone, already in the first year of career, came to us that it was better to go carefully with him.” In the line pointed out by Martín Peláez, in that building, posters have been seen, suggesting the situation.
After the university research has been made public and that the case of two women who complained to Podemos in September 2023 has come to light, Monedero has requested a decline and will not teach classes until further notice.
Each time groups of students or associations organized public actions to denounce harassment and impunity, face and monitor name appeared in painted and posters, along with other teachers with names and surnames. It happened, for example, in 2018 and also in 2022. The faculty sent them to withdraw them as soon as possible, students and teachers have.
Very critical of the institution’s performance
The components of the violet point, formed by teaching and administrative personnel and students, who accompany and support anyone who has suffered discrimination or sexual harassment, sexist or lgtbifobic in the university, are very critical of the position that the complution has had for decades with this matter. Moving from the search for support to a formal complaint, underline, is very difficult for a student and more when the institution does not take a proactive role.
Of the same opinion is Marcos Roitman, sociologist and political analyst, professor for years in the same faculty as Juan Carlos Monedero. “We shared students or classroom, he sometimes left class and I entered. And there were those conversations between students and teachers when there is a certain relationship of trust. They told you about certain comments, slug and rudeness, degrading comments, authoritarianism … ”, he says. Some of those students, he adds, were very young girls. He, emphasizes, came to withdraw the greeting for different reasons, also for his deal with students.
“If what is known about a teacher does not have to do with his teaching or with his academic work but with his behaviors in class, with his obscene and macho gestures, we are talking about a totally abnormal situation, and this is what happened” – the sociologist impresses. “What was normal is that the students were not going to denounce because there is a relationship of power and because he presumed, in addition, in class of his relationships with important people. And what was extraordinary is that more teaching staff did not raise the voice, that there would be no more responsibility and ethics in the faculty to do something, ”he says.
Act ex officio
But what to do if there is no formal complaint of a person willing to activate the protocol and to go through the process it supposes? Martín Peláez emphasizes that, beyond the concrete protocol of the university, public administrations have the obligation to open reserved information procedures when they have suspicions or any indication that a public employee could be committing an administrative offense or a crime.
“It is a file that opens the inspection of services and in which the facts or rumors are investigated to see if they are true and if there is a basis to initiate an official investigation. To open that file a complaint is not necessary for harassment, ”he explains, because precisely what is intended is to investigate and clarify. The official complaint is necessary to move from the information procedure reserved to the research file for harassment. That there is someone who ratifies the facts is only necessary in the processes for sexual harassment, but the same does not happen in other types of administrative offenses.
That the university opens ex officio this reserved information procedure, Paula Martín Peláez continues, “change the frame”, because it facilitates that possible victims and witnesses are encouraged to speak. “It is not the same as an individual person to make a complaint to the fact that the university initiates a file, because that already gives more security and women prove that there is a will. If you want a person who has suffered harassment by a teacher is encouraged to speak or ratify certain facts, a security and credibility environment must be created, ”he says. And that, they denounce from the violet point of Somosaguas, it was not the atmosphere that has existed so far in the Complutense.
The Complutense University alleges, however, that it cannot do anything in the face of suspicion if there is no complaint. On why he publicly reported this case, when he never does, the agency says it did the Faculty of Policies – and not the University at the institutional level – because it “felt obliged” in the face of the information that came out.
Was The country the one who last Thursday, He said that the Complutense investigated To Juan Carlos Monedero for harassment after the denunciation of a student. That morning, Eldiario.es had published that Podemos had knowledge of a woman’s written complaint about purse behaviors in September 2023, but that no formal inquiry began. As the victim did not respond to an email in which he was offered to initiate the procedure through a form, they explained, they did not continue with the process, despite the fact that the woman ensures that this mail does not know and that she had participated in it.
An independent expert in protocols against harassment and public administrations – which prefers not to give his name – confirms that, in this type of case, universities can and must open those reserved information files and collect the information that allows us to see if that can lead to a formal investigation for harassment. “As a public employee you have a series of obligations, and in the face of an infraction that has to do with equality or discrimination, the administration has to act,” he says. It is the service inspections that must take care of it, but affirms that what happens is usually just the other way around: “First the formal complaint is requested and the investigation is done and then the information process is opened and that makes the processes extend or that women are revictimized or that they renounce the process.”
Taking into account that in these types of cases those affected are usually students, whose results and careers depend on the indicated person, the matter is even more serious, he remembers, and there should not be these doubts about how to proceed in universities. The Complutense does not confirm whether or not there are more formal complaints against purse because that information is “reserved.” At the moment, the expolitic will not teach again: the Faculty of Policies and Sociology communicated on Thursday that Monedero had requested a decline and that his absence in classes was due to that reason.
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