Sexual violence in academia: Who will bell the cat?

In a way, it appears that sexual harassment has become to professors what ragging is to students in Sri Lanka: no one advocates for it, but everyone tacitly tolerates it, barring the rare exceptions who openly challenge it and campaign against it – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

By Niyanthini Kadirgamar

Public outcry over violence in Sri Lankan universities has focused mostly on ragging. Sexual violence, which is equally pervasive, remains an uncomfortable subject to broach when it occurs outside the realm of ragging.

As with other social transgressions that became starkly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, the long silence on sexual harassment in universities was momentarily shattered last year, when courageous women took to social media platforms to share their accounts of harassment, even making egregious messages from professors public.

What has been exposed is but the tip of the iceberg. Yet, the details show a disturbing spectrum in the behaviour of some educators while interacting with their students – from demeaning verbal sexual remarks and inappropriate touching to explicit requests for sexual favours, sexual bribery, sexual exploitation and forced sexual acts under intimidation.

Those affected, for the most part, opt to silently endure the harassment that can severely harm the body and mind, and are trying to find ways to cope. It is alarming to learn of the material costs accrued when survivors seek medical and counselling support, navigate, and find alternative learning arrangements to maintain anonymity and keep distance from their perpetrators. Costs which students who come from economically deprived backgrounds cannot afford. Familial and friends’ networks are subjected to immeasurable stress. Supportive parents have even tried pleading with the perpetrators to let their daughters alone. Young male students are also not spared. They are often made to participate as proteges and receivers of narratives of the sexual exploits of professors, with consequences that could damage themselves and others.

Few places around the world offer free, non-fee levying university education like in Sri Lanka, and women have grasped the opportunity, outnumbering male students in enrolments. However, in a male-oriented system prejudiced against them, the gains for women end with their hard-won inclusion. Much like in the domestic sphere, free labour is demanded of them in exchange for learning. Aggressive behaviour towards them is justified with biased assumptions about the sexual morality of students coming from a particular socio-economic background. The ‘helpless professor succumbing to the advances of a female student’ is a popular trope in so-called artistic representations about the university.

Even within progressive academic-activist circles, disturbing accounts circulate of heterosexual men co-opting assertive and liberatory sexual practices – that emerged from feminist/queer politics opposing heteronormativity – to sexually exploit or abuse young women, under the guise of “radical politics”. 

Confronting hierarchies within campus

Students from lower socio-economic backgrounds enter universities because of free education; however, the faculty being predominantly middle-class, widens the hierarchy that already exists between teacher and student. 

First-generation university entrants with little social capital rely a great deal on professors to orient them to academia and validate their work – this dependency aids the perpetuation of the violence.

Sexual violence often occurs in university settings within nurturing relationships, forged by paying extra attention, providing resources, offering mentorship, and opening opportunities for students. The dynamic between a first-generation female university student, reliant on a professor to ‘make it’ in the intimidating, unequal university space, not only amplifies the power already held by the university teacher, but also gives the person holding such power ample opportunity to abuse it.

Disclosures about sexual harassment in Sri Lankan academia coincided with a twitter revelation by a journalist drawing attention to such incidents in Sri Lankan newsrooms in June 2021. Apart from one publication that ran an editorial on the revelations and some foreign channels that covered it, almost all local media outlets were silent or indifferent.

Just like the journalistic spaces of intellectual labour, our universities too did not find it concerning enough to respond to, or even acknowledge, the violence that had seeped through the ivory towers.

This silence has to be understood in context. Most of the individuals accused in Sri Lankan academia as perpetrators are tenured professors enjoying high social status, or those revered as public intellectuals.

Sharing their stories, braving risks

In a way, it appears that sexual harassment has become to professors what ragging is to students in Sri Lanka: no one advocates for it, but everyone tacitly tolerates it, barring the rare exceptions who openly challenge it and campaign against it. 

Female students, junior faculty, and non-academic staff, who are often the targets of sexual harassment and violence on campuses, face professional and social ramifications for putting out their stories.

Little support or solidarity is extended to the few who have chosen to fight back. In this context, women have realised that the age-old ‘whisper networks’ are not sufficient to stop the violence. Encouraged by the #MeToo movements emerging across the globe, public forums were utilised to share experiences last year, sometimes with clearly identifiable descriptions of perpetrators, and have been effective in drawing attention and generating honest conversations, particularly among younger women.

While supportive communities were formed, and women received much needed affirmation, sharing their stories in public has brought in both brickbats and bouquets for these women, of course, with the brickbats having serious consequences to their academic life.

The likelihood of a tarnished reputation for the ‘indispensable middle-class intellectual’ who is in the line of fire, creates much social anxiety. Women are policed on how, and on which platforms they should speak about the issue. They are promptly told to ‘hush up’ or resort to institutional mechanisms, and that justice can only be done if affected parties come forward with credible evidence.

Power protects power

Yet, the biggest hurdle to any action against sexual harassment within academia is the protection known perpetrators enjoy in their affinity to acclaimed scholars in their fields, affable colleagues, comrades in political circles, and social-drinking buddies.

In the #MeToo debates world over, due process has often been upheld as an appropriate avenue to address the issue. However, survivors have little reason to trust due process, as very few instances of university processes have led to just action even when clear evidence is produced. While gender committees are important intermediaries, they too function on a limbo where chauvinists and others occupy the seats on a 2:1 ratio. Faculty boards and staff meetings are parochial forums for displaying machismo. 

Even representative bodies like the student and university teacher unions who are expected to safeguard the welfare of their members have steered clear of the issue. Thus, perpetrators continue to enjoy their place in the institutions, while survivors of sexual harassment and violence are silenced and pushed further to the margins. The gravity of this comes into clearer focus when we consider how our educational institutions entrench, protect, and even venerate power. 

Couched in the rhetoric of fairness, influential academics often offer a sophisticated denial when challenged about their silence, or declare an unmistakable desire to give their colleague, and not the student, the benefit of doubt. 

There are also enough instances in the global academic scene of professors trying to derail and discredit due process. Even as I pen this article, letters signed by renowned scholars in support of John Comaroff – one of the three Harvard University anthropologists who were investigated and found responsible for sexual harassment – are sending shock waves across academia.

If it hadn’t been for a lawsuit and the full list of complaints against him released to the public, the narrative of the signatories – of a “committed university citizen” being sanctioned for providing “advice intended to protect an advisee from sexual violence” – would have stuck. Some have now retracted their support, but most without an apology.

The only saving grace in this instance is that 73 other Harvard professors did not join the signatories’ clique, and instead followed up with a letter of support to the students.

This incident follows a similar pattern to that of New York University’s Ronell Avital case which caught the public eye in 2018 when again, highly acclaimed professors signed a letter in support of their friend while investigations were still underway. Avital was found guilty and suspended without pay for a year for sexually harassing her student. 

When queried about the evidence that had emerged after the letter of support for the accused was written, the response given to Jon Wiener by postcolonial feminist theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – a signatory to the letter – summed up what most university dons won’t admit to: “loyalty gets in the way of the law.”

Indeed, responding to an allegation of sexual harassment appears to be a slippery slope for intellectuals of every political hue – the leftist, the feminist, the anti-racist, the queer theorist. It points to a blatant disparity between their scholarship and practice.

While the complexity in human interactions cannot be denied, sometimes all it takes is the humble act of listening to affected persons to gain clarity. Fixating on the accused professor can make one lose sight of who is harmed.

The apathy of university teachers must not be mistaken for an incapacity to act, proven by rallying to protect their elite club from falling into disrepute. Nor should we discount their power to shape the discourse around sexual violence in academia – to mystify, trivialise and redefine it, even weaponise theoretical constructs, to defend perpetrators and confuse the rest with jargon that seeks to intimidate or dismiss.

The argument of a right to sexual desire between professor and student has also been put forward in this debate. 

Is there a right to sex? Philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s response to the question is in the negative. Desire or sex is not owed she argues. Rather, desire must be approached as a political question that follows the patterns of domination and exclusion.

What is owed by the professor and the student then? What is owed by the university? Returning to those fundamental questions can help us as we grapple with persisting sexual violence in academia. 

It is time for honest introspection and a ruthless scrutiny of the power structures operating within campuses. Free exchange of ideas and critical thought cannot flourish within a structure of patronage that furnishes power to the professor to make or break the futures of the students. 

As every interaction is a pedagogical moment, the problem of sexual harassment in academia poses a greater challenge, to education itself. The prevalence of harassment signals a fundamental betrayal of learning for the student who has stepped into campus in pursuit of higher education. To arrest this destructive trend, the hierarchies of teaching and learning must be upended. 

(The writer is a PhD student in education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.)