The sources consulted by DF highlight the role that University power structures have played in the impunity of harassers and in the attacks to their victims. One of the clearest cases is that of H, who had a University position that served her as launch pad for what interested her most, that is, to achieve a fruitful career in politics. Amongst those people who shared her same ideological option, she was chosen for radio and television talk shows because she had a position that provided an intellectual image to such talks.
Previously she had publicly shown admiration for the research group that had broken the silence, while she did not dare to do so for a long time in the past. Nevertheless, she had won that job thanks to a very small difference in votes, believing she could only keep it by leading the attack against the victims, thus protecting those who victims denounced.
When she received the first registered complaint in the entry record book, she assessed what would be the best choice for her political ambition, whether to support the victims or the aggressor rather. If she opted to attack the victims, she was convinced that she would keep the post as long as the University regulations would allow her to, but that option was risky as if what she did in the past became publicly known, she would face her future political chances cut short. If, on the other hand, she went ahead with the complaint supporting the victims, she was certain that she would not win the next elections again so that she would not be able to stay in her University job and her launch pad would no longer serve her purposes to achieve her intended political positions.
At that time, the Director of the Harvard Office against Sexual Harassment said in front of her that if the faculty or the student body would not speak out clearly in favour of the victims, then she would go nowhere in politics. However, she preferred to follow a different advice that said that our situation was very different to that in Harvard and that here she could attack victims in a way that nobody would believe them.
She gradually realised that her situation became more and more complicated. A student decided to break the silence about the harassment she suffered from a well-known professor through his despicable behaviour. The press reported that the prosecutor’s report included the fact that H was aware about the harassment that went back to the days when she was still a student. A senior political official told the press: if you knew, why didn’t you do anything about it?
She already saw an imminent danger when the professor decided to return to his post at the University and the student body launched a massive campaign of signatures to protect them from being harassed. It was then when journalists supporting H in the media launched a cruel lynching against the victims based on the lies of, amongst others, the four people described from Omerta 6 to Omerta 9.
There is an ever-increasing number of politicians nowadays who do not wish to socialise with her since they are shocked about the position she took and because they know that, as time passes by, the whole truth will be disclosed and most citizens will reject this kind of behaviour which obviously will have a devastating electoral cost.
In the short term, she might manage to achieve some political positions, but she will never achieve the ones she was after in the medium and the long term, because the women and feminist movements and the rejection towards the harassers and their accomplices by the citizenship are growing very rapidly.
