The struggle against gender violence and, especially, the first steps that are taken to break the silence have been identified in the scientific literature as moments of attacks against those who dare to speak up. The present research evidences the similarities of the Spanish context to the experiences made on an international level in the 80s and 90s when the silence was first broken in the US or Canada (Reilly, et al., 1986; Osborne, 1995). As Valls and her colleagues (in press) have pointed out, retaliations and attacks on the faculty who dared to break the silence with a pioneer research have been fierce. The main aim of these attacks is to silence these voices, and the means employed to reach this aim range from discrediting the authors of breaking the silence to making the academic career impossible. In the following, examples of the retaliations that brave people received are presented and display the inhumanity that the feudal structure of the Spanish higher education institutions –the Spanish elite– is capable of bearing inside. The quote of Irene, one of the victims, summarizes this climate.
Those things that came afterwards [after reporting] were worse than what he [the aggressor] did. (Irene, victim)
Among the victims of gender violence there are three major retaliations that stand out as the most salient: to be subject of ridicule, to be questioned, and to have academic punishments in form of lowering the grades or failing subjects. After filing the report against her classmate who had been harassing her, Irene suffered under the constant mocking of some of the professors who subjected her to ridicule in class. For example,
one day during a presentation she had in class, the professor continuously interrupted and then ignored her.
I started talking and than she [the professor] stopped me and said ‘well what she wants to say is this and this and that. But well as she doesn’t speak Spanish very well’ (…) The third time that she stopped me she did so for one hour and a half, and well I was sitting up on the dais for one hour and a half, and she downstairs with the rest of the class. And people were seated in a U and she closed the circle turning her back on me. R: But you were speaking in Spanish? - Yes, I did the presentation in Spanish, because if we didn’t the students got annoyed, and then she said ‘Oh I’m sorry but it’s very hard for her to speak Spanish.’ (Irene,
victim)
Maria recalls the declarations she had to do in front of the different judges in the frame of the university investigation as moments of great distress. She explains that rather than being heard she felt interrogated about her academic position and personal relations to those who had reported her testimony. Moreover, she was forced to sign the notes of that declaration in a rush although she had serious objections. According to her, the notes did not reflect her words but were rather an erroneous interpretation of her words twisting the reality.
He [the judge from the university legal services] didn’t ask me at all about how I had felt or the situations of harassment that I had lived. It was all about my academic environment and the relations that I had in these power structures. How I got to know this professor, why he reported instead of me, what kind of relation I had with him, why he was the supervisor of my dissertation, like a series of questions that were questioning me as a person to find out whether I had any purpose for being against the accused professor. (…) The person who took notes of this meeting printed them and gave them to me so that I could sign them, but there were things that I didn’t say, or that I hadn’t said like this, so I corrected some things, she checked them and printed them again, and I started to read and there were things that I didn’t agree, but the judge made me sign it, like ‘Come on quickly, we have to go, we have to talk to other people, we have already spent too much time with you’ well is that a manner to treat a victim who
is telling you the situation of harassment that she had experienced? It was not humane at all, not to talk about ethics either. (Maria, victim)
A part from these attacks against the dignity of the victims, they also suffered retaliations in regard to their academic file. One of the former directors of the equality unit at her university explains the situation lived by one of the victims who had reported her professor for sexual harassment.
she [victim] was a master student and she was trying to pass the master program. So subjects that she had already passed, this man [harasser], we don’t know what his purpose was, but he tried to modify the grades. That happened during the investigation of the case and we, as well as the administration staff, suspect that this could be an attempt of some sort of retaliation. (Begoña,
institutional representative)
Another type of retaliation that student and victims of gender violence experience is rather common among the faculty or institutional representatives, but this example only makes it clear that the feudal structures and the functioning in these structures is reproduced among the student body. Irene was the student representative but the increasing tensions among the students and her due to the report of the sexual harassment by her classmate forced her to quit from that position.
I had to quit being the student representative because of the pressure of the rest of the classmates. (Irene, victim)
Also, students participated in questioning the victims and blaming them for the situations that resulted from the harassment they had received in the first place. In this vein, Sofia explains how bad she felt when students were blaming her for denying access to a student, her harasser, who might suffer a psychological problem.
the class took the standpoint of ‘well he has a psychiatric problem, we need to make sure that he takes his medication’ at that point I was like, it was overwhelming because if he has a psychiatric problem, which I don’t know and I don’t care, and if he doesn’t take his medicine it’s not my problem! I don’t have to control who is taking his medicine and who doesn’t, what I know is that I am feeling bad. And that’s when they said that I wasn’t acting in solidarity, that
everybody had the right to study. That made me feel horrible. It’s against my principles I want that everybody gets to university… and they accused me of being an egoist… (Sofia, victim)
In these examples it becomes clear that the communicative acts used are not illocutionary, looking for understanding among the participants and based on respect and transparency. Rather the diverse interactions among the victims or supportive faculty and institutional representatives with those people who question or ridicule them are marked by perlocutionary communicative acts that have hidden perlocutionary effects of making the victims or second order victims feel bad.