University Policies to Tackle Gender and Sexual Violences: The Catalan Case Study

Since the last decades EU recommendation, public and educational institutes have established specific 'egalitarian observatories' to design and implement gender policies. As a result higher educational institutions have, with pressure of feminist movements, taken measures to support equality, prevent and dealing with gender and sexual violences, violences often not even recognized in our academic context Although slowly and in a very varied forms, universities have been implementing policies through the instrument of protocols to address sexual violence’s, which mostly recognize these kinds of acts as punishable behavior. In our presentation, based in the preliminary results of the research-action project “Universities Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence: Training for Sustainable Services (UsvReact)”, we critically compare the Catalan universities' protocols and assess the impact of these policies. The main finding is that protocols often become dead letters because of the lack of specificity on how the law should be implemented. Furthermore, our informants make it clear that, in the resolution of sexual violences cases, universities tend to preserve the "institutional image" in detriment of the policies effectiveness and survivors' needs and rights. Our results shown that in order to overcome the lack of effectiveness of gender mainstreaming politics in universities, in the future it’ll be necessary problematizing the use of protocols such as the "only" tools to take action and prevent sexual violences in higher education institutions.