Today two years ago, June 13th 2016, some media launched a lynching against the victims who dared to break the silence in our universities. Who were the sources of the lies they presented as if they were facts? Let us see one of them, a child abuser.
Z had private classes as a reserve for underage girls whom to abuse. In this case he first gained L’s family’s trust in order to harass her with more impunity, he had even managed to be invited to family reunions. L’s dear ones could not even imagine what was about to happen, nor could they think about it once it happened. In that situation, Z’s pressure on L became stronger and stronger until he achieved to abuse her. When years later L started to participate in a research group, Z left his to ask to be admitted in that one, using his curriculum in the other one and a competency on a subject, which was very rare by then. He was soon disliked due to his persistence in chasing many girls, not accepting their denial to having sex with him, and due to a comment he made regarding a municipality in the coast, treating all girls as p.
There are many and diverse sources which DF has been able to consult about all this process. That research group started little after its open breakdown of the silence about gender violence (GV) in universities, including the first research funded by the Women’s Institute of the Spanish Government and another one funded by the Catalan Institute of Women. In the process of preparation of what would become these studies, L told two feminists from the women’s group what Z had done to her when she was a minor, and how annoyed she felt with him. Z refused to give his version, he left the group and soon started explaining L’s family that she had entered a sect and that they should not believe anything she told them because she had been psychologically manipulated. The family wanted to know the truth and L gave them all sorts of details until Z could not deny it and was expelled from the family. From that moment on L’s mother (and other family members) was a great advocate of the research group which had supported her daughter. They could not report because, unfortunately, those felonies prescribe, then and now, in the Spanish legislation, although there is a growing movement for them not to prescribe.
At the beginning, Z’s slander had very little dissemination, but he insisted on uniting with anyone to make the greatest harm possible. However, the progress in the breakdown of silence about GV united other harassers and their accomplices to that campaign. From then on, a growing number of individuals collaborates with that child abuser, also calling the research group “sect”, a research group which is considered at the international level as one of the most open, democratic and transparent ones.
* This article is part of Omerta in the University, a series of publications that address the fierce law of silence generated in some Universities concerning sexual harassment.
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