How Universities Shape Students’ Experiences with Gender-Based Violence in India

• In Event: Examining Well-being and Belonging in Higher Education: Global Perspectives on Student Mental Health, Stress, and Identity

Proposal

On February 2020, at around 6:30 pm in New Delhi, the capital of India, a group of intoxicated men entered the campus of the famous all-girls Gargi College and sexually assaulted female students during their annual festival “Reverie”. The men were middle-aged political goons who bypassed the college security to enter the campus and harassed several female students in broad daylight. Female students were groped, molested, and masturbated at in the presence of college security and staff, and no action was taken against the perpetrators. It could be argued that violence was committed twice, first by the recognizable agents of the male attackers and then by the abstract entity of the higher education institution (HEI), specifically those aspects within its structure and culture that enabled the direct act of violence to take place. The perpetrators committed violence in broad daylight in the presence of college staff because they knew they could get away with it, and they did. It is this nexus between the direct acts of gender-based violence (GBV) and the structural and cultural characteristics of a large public university in India, henceforth called "Indian University" (IU), that my study seeks to explore.

Specifically, I draw on focus group discussions and art-based narrative interviews conducted with sixty women students from the Indian University to identify and conceptualize those structural and cultural characteristics of the university that shaped their experiences with GBV. I use the term ‘structure’ and ‘culture’ as heuristic tools to distinguish the formal limitations on institutional stakeholders (i.e., the structure), such as the legal mechanism for reporting cases, the curriculum, and the infrastructure, from the largely unspoken collective assumptions, values, norms, and attitudes (i.e., the culture) that guide individuals’ thoughts and actions in an organization (Janićijević, 2013). While organizations may contain within them multiple sub- and counter- structures and cultures (Lumby & Foskett, 2016), the terms are used as starting points of analysis to uncover the nexus between students’ experiences with GBV and the institutional characteristics.

India constitutes a critical site of investigation because of the rapidly growing higher education sector and increased enrollment of women students on the one hand, and traditional gender norms, increased political conservatism, and attacks on academic freedom within universities on the other hand (Altbach, 2023; Chauhan, 2023; More women are pursuing higher education now than ever before, March 8, 2022). In such a context, a university’s structure and culture play a critical role in providing a safe and inclusive learning environment to student. Evidence suggests that organizational cultures that support diversity and inclusion, promote transparency and accountability, and diffuse the hierarchical structures between faculty and students contribute to the prevention of gender-based violence (Benya et al, 2018). Conversely, cultures of institutionalized sexism and misogyny sustain GBV by normalizing and minimizing violence (Banyard et al, 2009).

The study is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it undercuts the discourse of ‘girls as passive victims’ (Leach and Humphreys, 2007) to focus on the role played by the HEIs in empowering them to resist GBV and/or disempowering them into silence and passivity. Such an analysis helps deconstruct the notion of young women as a group who are always passive, weak, non-agentic, and at the mercy of men (Roberts et al, 2019, p.27). This also provides a useful foundation on which to build future policies aimed at empowering students’ resistance to GBV. Secondly, the study goes beyond an exclusive focus on individual pathology of perpetrators of violence to analyse the complex manner in which the structures and cultures within higher education institutions (HEIs) are implicated in sustaining gender-based violence (GBV). This provides a useful foundation on which to build contextually effective socio-structural responses that focus on both systemic and individual drivers of GBV in HEIs.

In the presentation, I will show how forces of patriarchy, politics, intergenerational hierarchies, unfair hiring/retention practices, and neoliberalism come together at the Indian University to exacerbate the threats of GBV faced by women students. I employ the framework of institutional betrayal (Smith & Freyd, 2014) to conceptualize the harms visited on victim-survivors due to these institutional characteristics. Specifically, the findings demonstrate how institutional betrayal within Indian University operated via acts of "omission" as well as "commission". Some examples of acts of omission include the absence of formal guidelines for establishment of queer societies, and the lack of robust and transparent accountability measures that 1) help ensure effective functioning of GBV preventative and protective services, and 2) prevent the abuse of power by faculty. Some examples of acts of commission include cases when administrators refused to take action against right-wing perpetrators of homophobic and Islamophobic violence, or when the faculty choose to remain silent despite being aware of the perpetration of GBV by colleagues. I conceptualize these acts of omissions or commissions as encompassing a form of institutional betrayal because they contributed to exacerbation of trauma and psychological distress faced by victims (Smith & Freyd, 2014).

Based on the findings, I argue for the need for scholars and policymakers to identify and address those institutional patterns that sustain or inhibit GBV within universities, and design policies accordingly. Violence does not occur in a vacuum, and if universities continue to engage in virtue-signaling via tokenistic legislations without working towards transforming the institutional culture, the promise of free and safe university campuses will remain a distant dream. I end the presentation by drawing attention to the policy and scholarly implications of my findings, with a focus on how higher education institutions (HEIs) can strengthen their organizational structure to ensure speedy redressal of GBV grievances, as well as foster a campus culture of inclusivity and respect.

Author

• Ruchi Saini, University of Maryland College Park