This article describes harassment practices in higher education and explains why they are taken for granted, besides documenting forms of resistance reported by some students and professors. From January 2016 to March 2017, nine in-depth interviews were held with students who had experienced harassment at a public school of law in Mexico City, Mexico, besides interviews with three male students and two female professors. The findings suggest that some professors harass selectively, based on dress codes associated with gender stereotypes. Harassment can be viewed as an exemplary punishment with corrective purposes, or part of school discipline and the formation of female students’ identity at the institution. The study also detected forms of heteronormative vigilance that take harassment for granted, to the degree that some female students consider it part of a lifestyle to which they have to adapt in order to complete their studies. Other female students have found ways of denouncing harassment, through informal strategies by which they have contributed to exposing and denaturalizing this gender violence. For example, some professors have ordered female students to wear skirts when taking exams, but this order is not always obeyed, and the students that have refused have organized resistance movements. Thus far there has been no intervention by the university administration to guarantee harassment-free spaces for women, which highlights the need to create guidelines and rules for higher education that allow typifying such acts as serious offenses and preventing sexual harassment.
Keywords:
Bullying; Higher Education; Violence