Gender violence protocols abound at Mexican universities, but justice is elusive

Posters displayed as part of an escrache action in Puebla. Photo: Courtesy.

Opinion • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar • December 15, 2023 • Leer en castellano

Earlier this month, a student who was accused of sexually assaulting a minor last April was granted his doctorate from the Autonomous University of Puebla.

Following the assault, formal reports were filed both at the university and with Puebla’s Public Prosecutor's Office.

As on many other occasions, neither the so-called Gender Commission nor the Office of Legal Affairs at the Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP, in its Spanish initials) fulfilled their obligation to support the minor who was assaulted or to impose a sanction on the aggressor.

The victim of the assault is the daughter of another BUAP student. University officials should have acted immediately when they were notified of the attack but, instead, created a bureaucratic labyrinth that prevented meaningful action.

The outcome of all of this was that authorities denied justice to an assault victim, a student who was accused of assault graduated, and the institution faced a major scandal.

From anti-justice to direct action

Paradoxically, university officials justified their inaction by appealing to the "seriousness of the act" committed. 

The assault was not only an "offense" but also a "possible crime" because the victim was a minor. As a result, university officials recommended filing a report with the Public Prosecutor's Office (MP, in its Spanish acronym) and made clear what took place there would determine their response to the events. 

However, the staff at the BUAP’s Gender Commission claimed that the university’s actions would not depend on the Public Prosecutor’s actions.

A few months later, when the MP’s investigation stalled, the same university officials declared that they had to wait for the legal case to be resolved and could not make any decisions before that occurred.

That is how minor who had been assaulted, her mother and a large group of student and teacher allies became entangled in yet another case in which the"legal" system produces impunity. 

Data from the National Survey on the Dynamics of Household Relationships (ENDIREH, in Spanish) analyzed by Equis Justicia para la Mujer in 2019 indicate 47.1 percent of Mexican women—around 30 million people—have experienced some type of sexual assault in an educational setting over the course of their lives. The same report notes the ample evidence of the Mexican government’s repeated refusal to investigate violence against women.

In the case described above, one institution—the university, which we are told is less bureaucratic—defers to another, the state of Puebla, which is completely ineffective, and whose record of investigating cases is nothing short of pathetic. Activists and specialists in Puebla say the state government commits institutional violence against women by acting in a discriminatory way against women who are victims of crime as well as women who are accused of committing a crime.

This context provides the perfect pretext for the university to abandon its responsibility. "Exquisite incompetence" is what journalist John Gibler called these useless and overlapping formalities.

Disruption, not silence

Mobilized teachers and students faced a series of difficult questions as a result of this sordid conflict. 

How is it possible to break the silence imposed by stagnant and useless procedures while also avoiding revanchist or revictimizing behavior?

How can we simultaneously sustain an anti-carceral stance while also avoiding the trap of mechanisms that produce impunity as described above?

At the insistence of female professors, who had to overcome opposition from several of their male colleagues, university faculty decided to write an open letter that would be read aloud before the accused student's dissertation defense took place. Even though there weren’t major consequences, this would disrupt the institutional complicity in the events that resulted from stagnant legal processes. 

On the day of the defense, a group of mostly women students and a few men carried out a noisy protest action. They made public statements, kicked up a fuss, and put up a lot of posters. Their slogan that day was: "Being a doctor does not mean you aren’t an aggressor."

A cascade of actions against violence in the academy

The problem of multiple forms of violence against women in universities is immense, and it is not new. Between October 2019 and April 2020—just before and during the first six weeks of pandemic confinement—women from different schools and departments held strikes at and took over at least 19 campuses belonging to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, in Spanish).

The strikes and occupations were the result of a climate of growing weariness. Women students broke their silence not only because of the violence they endured, but also because of the disdain with which their reports of abuse were received. The best known occupations occurred at the departments of Philosophy and Literature and Political and Social Sciences on UNAM’s main campus. Each lasted several months.

These events were discussed in a virtual conference organized by the Network of Decolonial Feminists on December 13. When professors Márgara Millán, Verónica López Nájera and Esperanza Basurto reflected on the organized student struggles of 2019–2020,  they underscored that significant challenges remain in the long battle for justice in cases of violence against women in universities.

Our colleagues agreed that young women students are fed up. As the case of Puebla illustrates, the ineffectiveness of the university bodies that are supposed to respond to, prevent and punish violence against women only generates more frustration.

Millán noted that during the classroom occupations, at least in the Department of Political and Social Sciences, mobilized students and faculty built important ties. This occurred through careful and sensitive exchanges, in which professors worked to create horizontal relationships with students, and took a clear stance against any attempt to repress their mobilization. 

In these meetings, the compañeras—both students and some teachers—began to imagine ways to de-escalate the most heated part of the conflict, as the occupations continued even as pandemic related shutdowns began to occur. 

Something similar took place in Puebla, although there have yet to be any occupations. 

Today, the double edge of creating formal gender protocols, and the limits of such protocols, are being actively debated by student groups and in meetings between faculty and students. Little by little, we are overcoming distrust and beginning to foster new relations and dialogues.

The trap of gender protocols

Protocols against gender violence, which were once thought an effective tool for responding to violence against women, have become a dead end as a whole.

López Nájera, who is on the faculty of UNAM's Department of Political and Social Sciences, pointed out that before these protocols were adopted, when a complaint was presented to a female professor or a mid-level university bureaucrat, it was not always clear what to do next or to whom to turn.

Gender protocols established steps and a procedure and, as a consequence, it is now a little clearer how to file a report, at least at UNAM and some other universities. However, a stubborn refusal to recognize the full extent of violence in classrooms and in universities generally remains. That is the case even with clear protocols in place. As a result, these protocols often make a mockery of the victim and those who are standing by their side.

Challenging impunity

I think it is worth proposing a couple of ways that we could advance a critique of the difficulties inherent in the protocolization of the response to gender violence in universities. 

First, protocols almost always require that so-called experts, and not the affected community, determine the approach and eventual solution—if one is reached—in each specific instance. 

This ensures that the process followed in particular cases resembles what happens in the currently existing judicial system: they are secret, opaque and slow, and the aggrieved parties have no opportunity to participate. If the investigation does advance, it focuses exclusively on punishing the aggressor.

Second, protocolization shares the official (in)justice system’s tendency to focus on categories of behaviors that constitute offenses and their applicability to individual cases.

The context and singularity of each act of aggression are ignored. So, then, is the possibility of imagining and producing other forms of truth, redress and repair.

It is worth asking whether we can draw a direct line between protocolization, with its desire for universality and the establishment of set steps, and punitivism. In a protocolized setting, the only thing that appears to be resolved is whether or not to punish and, if so, how much.

These investigations often stagnate, as we have seen in Puebla. This means that those demanding justice frequently end up getting caught up in the demand for punishment. 

In the case of UNAM’s Political and Social Sciences Department, the creation of a course on "women's struggles against violence" is one achievement of the "transgressive conflict"—to use scholar Guiomar Rovira’s term—that took place when organized women sparked the direct actions of 2019–2020. 

As we open and defend more expansive spaces to learn about and discuss issues of mutual interest together with students—beyond the scope of institutional gender studies—our presence in the university and the arduous and often thankless task of producing justice hang in the balance.