‘You kind of expect it - it's not necessarily ok, but at the same time I've gotten used to it’. Tackling sexual harassment in higher educational institutions

Abstract

Higher educational institutions are considered by Reedy (2019) as misogynistic institutions created by men for men (Deveaux, 1994). With women’s increased participation in higher educational institutions, the structures, policies, and measures have been tweaked to facilitate women’s and other minority groups’ entry, retention, and progression. However, this is not enough since there is a trend to undermine the efficacy of written and codified rules which prescribe and proscribe ‘acceptable forms of behaviour’. This paper will do this by analysing sexual harassment at the University of Malta. Feminist institutional ethnography will be used to find out where sexual harassment occurs at the University of Malta, when this occurs, who the targets are, and whether incidents were reported. In this paper, the focus will be on finding out how effective staff and students perceive the university’s sexual harassment policy to be, what changes they want to see enacted for them to feel ‘safe’, and where. Feminist institutional, post-colonial and de-colonial theory together with an intersectional approach will be used as ontological tools to help deconstruct the taken for granted, to come up with alternatives. As educational institutions, universities must challenge, rather than produce outcomes which help reproduce broader social and political gender expectations.