Fernando Camacho Servin
Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday, September 18, 2022, p. 10
Gender violence in the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) is a phenomenon systematic and widespread
to which the authorities have only responded with strategies bureaucratic
that seem designed to hinder access to justice and tire out
to the complainants, pointed out students of that house of studies.
One of the main demands in the list of petitions from the students who in recent weeks have taken schools is that schemes are applied to prevent and punish harassment, sexual assault, as well as other forms of violence.
Yazmín Jiménez, a student at the Higher School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering (Esime), Zacatenco unit, explained in an interview with the day that in the IPN it is common for many teachers to ask female students for sexual favors to pass subjects or to prevent them from being ridiculed and minimized
in class, questioning his academic abilities.
In careers such as engineering, which are still predominantly male and in which a climate of machismo prevails, women have gradually been gaining space, and although there are instances in charge of dealing with complaints – such as the Polytechnic Rights Ombudsman – in fact its operation is very poor, he charged.
“In December 2019, the Polytechnic launched a gender protocol, but we realized that it was very bureaucratic: they send you to many commissions beforehand and you have to have documented evidence, otherwise the complaints do not proceed. There are processes that take up to four months to obtain a response and that is not operational.
We also noticed that the institute only changes schools to the accused teachers or makes them teach other subjects. There are no administrative acts or awareness so that they realize that they are doing something wrong
Jimenez noted.
As an example of the seriousness of what is happening, he recalled the cases of Jasmine
of the vocational 7 who would have been drugged and sexually assaulted on that campus in March of this year, and that of Rosa María Nicolás, a student at the Higher School of Chemical Engineering, who reported having been raped by a sports coach, whom she the institution retired, but without sanctioning him or giving the victim a copy of the investigation folder.
After underlining that the environment of misogyny in the IPN generates many cases of women dropping out of school, he pointed out that a possible course of action is to allow the complainants and the groups that accompany them to participate in the work groups against gender violence. and even modify the respective protocol.
Also, campaigns should be carried out to sensitize teachers, students and parents, and make them understand the seriousness. The women of Esime exist and resist
he stated.
