These days we have talked and reflected on collective responsibility for gender-based abuse and we have heard repeatedly – most with the best intentions – that we must report, but the reality is that reporting is not easy and often it is not even possible.
When I first spoke to Sara, it was late at night, we were both tired. I noticed a slight tremor in her voice as she launched into the first tirade she had prepared when she knew I was going to call her. I understood why he tried to soften the most horrific details of his story with a sigh, an attempt at a laugh, or a punchline in a slightly lower tone: “Now I’m embarrassed but then…”.
Another thing she said at the beginning of the conversation was that she had never thought about telling what happened to her with Iñigo Errejón, that she knew that she would be questioned for having accepted certain requests, that she blamed herself for not having been able to get out of this situation sooner.
Talking about it, putting words to the trauma, often means forgiving yourself. It is a reparation to claim one’s own rediscovered will, to recognize the wounds in order to close them. Sharing it, Sara explains, means putting a double mirror in front of society. One which reflects that abuse and mistreatment are much more present than we want to believe, and another in which women can recognize that no one is safe from falling into the traps which exploit this certainty: we We have been socialized to please, to please, to seek validation from the male gaze. And even as we rebel against it, we sometimes find ourselves entangled in “strategies that are very subtle and complicated to recognize,” as sexual violence expert Bárbara Tardón described it. “There is a lot of exercise of power and it ends up trapping the victim like a net,” he explains in this article.
“Sometimes I realize very late that someone has physically abused me,” said actress Vicky Luengo, star of At first glancea monologue by Suzie Miller in which she plays a criminal lawyer who is the victim of rape.
The protagonist is aware – from her own professional experience – that her case will be called into question, that she is not the “perfect victim”, that she has said and done things that will lead to her being questioned , and she wonders whether or not she should report it. “We all understand what it means to be raped in the street, but not when someone commits physical violence to you on a more intimate level, for example. There is no woman who is not upset by this story,” Luengo analyzed.
These days we have spoken and reflected on collective responsibility in the face of sexist abuse and we have heard repeatedly – most with the best intentions – that we must denounce, that there is a lack of complaints, that legal procedures are guarantees. and are the only way to stop this type of behavior. The reality is that reporting is not easy and many times, it is not even possible. There are facts that are unlikely to result in criminal charges, but are just as serious and reprehensible.
In 2020, Belén López Peiró published Why do you come back every summer?a book in which she recounts the sexual abuse suffered by her uncle for years during the holidays she spent with him. “I realized over time that the question they were asking me was not a question. It wasn’t, “Why do you come back every summer?” to try to understand the process. It was a statement: because you came back, they mistreated you,” López Peiró explained of his case. “Most of the questions were accusations or justifications. It’s also structural,” the writer reflected.
The story (and the legal complaint) dynamited her family and exposed her to discredit and alienation from her own loved ones. The book combines the voices of her parents, her cousins, the professionals who treated her, lawyers… This polyphonic structure, explained López Peiró, allows “to challenge each person who reads it, whether it is colleague, friend, mother of a friend… anyone who is part of this society that allows us to remain silent.
The legal complaint against the story of Errejón and Sara in elDiario.es places us in front of an uncomfortable gray scale but at the same time it throws us a certainty: some of the wounds that live hidden or that have not gone beyond the confession between friends. , they exposed themselves publicly. It has been difficult for these women to find their voice and be able to raise it, even recognizing that they have not done what, from their current perspective, they would have liked to have done then.
If we look at them, let it be to try to understand, to question ourselves, as López Peiró says, as agents of this silence that they dared to break. If we want to examine something, let it first be what we consider normal or impossible to change for too long. If we want to question something, let it be our prejudices, let it be this order that we have given ourselves. If we must focus on anything, let it be on this collective wound that – reading so many messages that attack and question – seems so difficult to heal.
