Clampdown on dirty dons

By Domenico Pacitti

A voluntary resistance group which has been combating the sexual harassment of female students by their professors at the University of Bari in southern Italy, has succeeded in highlighting the problem by staging the country's first ever national forum on the exploitation of academic power for sexual favours. But despite the breakthrough, the forum's conclusion that cultural rather than legislative changes are required points to a daunting task ahead.
  
Giraffa (an Italian acronym for "Research and Resistance Group Against Female Folly - Ah!"), which numbers a wide range of professionals as well as "plain housewives" among its thirty feminist volunteers, was the brainchild of Ida Mastromarino, a remarkable multi-talented lady who took top honours at Umberto Eco's celebrated faculty of arts, music and media studies in Bologna and went on to write and direct her own work for Rome's prestigious Teatro Sistina.
  
She currently presents her own programme, "Through Women's Eyes" for Italy's biggest local TV station Telenorba, where she is doggedly applying her talents to projecting a dignified image of women.
  
"We get up to ten cases a year in Bari of girls being sexually harassed by their professors, but I believe that this is only the tip of an inestimable iceberg which is common to Italian universities generally," said Ida. "Students are simply too afraid to speak out and report incidents for fear of reprisals. People tend to react by saying that wearing a miniskirt or displaying a plunging neckline means asking for trouble."
  
Familiar cases range from the reassuring hand-on-thigh "Don't worry Miss you'll see that the exam will go well" tactic, to the more direct "You can have full marks but it will involve locking the door" approach. Those respectable professors who are aware of such misdemeanors are said to tacitly condone them by observing the conventional mafia-like code of silence known as omertà, each with his own reasons for not speaking out. Significantly, not one professor attended Ida's forum, though all were invited.
  
"Sexual harassment is literally a social activity here and reflects the prevalent male mentality," Mastromarino explained. "When you consider that women are also widely maltreated in the home, where five out of every ten murders take place, you begin to get an idea of how deep-rooted the problem is. Two thousand years of Church indoctrination has done little to help matters."
  
The turning point for Mastromarino was when an uninitiated first-year student rushed out of her seventy-year-old professor's study in tears, complaining that after asking her whether she believed in free love and had a boyfriend, he suddenly grabbed hold of her and kissed her on the lips.
  
"It was a shattering experience for the girl, who saw her ideal of university as a temple of culture sharply transformed into one of a temple of doom," said Mastromarino.
  
Incensed by the lack of initiative on the part of the university authorities, she had an open letter to Bari rector Aldo Cossu published in five national dailies. It condemned an entrenched and widespread "your beauty for my power" philosophy. It also revealed explicit offers of exams in exchange for sex.
  
"The letter did the trick," Mastromarino laughed. "Notwithstanding considerable university opposition, the rector showed himself to be a real gentleman by financing our forum out of university funds. Other rectors would do well to follow his example."
  
The group's next step is to press for a special surveillance committee composed of students and professors - a unanimously accepted proposal made at the forum by Imma Barbarossa of the local equal opportunities commission.
  
Silvia Costa, a former higher education under-secretary and present chairwoman of the national equal opportunities commission and the European Commission's equal opportunities consultancy committee, sees the problem of sexual harassment at universities as part of a wider cultural one. But she also stresses the deterrent value of the law.
  
"The Bari case," she emphasised, "is highly significant in that it took a female resistance group to sensitise the rector, which is why I am in favour of setting up surveillance groups within our universities. Some universities already have them, but further refinement of regulations is required to encourage students to have more confidence in their discretion and efficiency in obtaining results."
  
Although official police figures show an alarming 40% per cent increase in sex-related crimes for last year against a stable overall crime rate, feminists are taking heart from recent developments.
  
A new law protecting women against sexual harassment in the workplace was passed in April, but more pressure will be necessary to extend it to universities. The higher education ministry has created for the first time a special panel of female professors to tackle feminist issues within universities. A recent election at the University for Foreigners in Perugia has just produced Italy's second female rector.
  
And in May parliament unanimously passed a bill whereby civil servants, including university professors, found guilty of crimes such as abuse of office and corruption could in future be automatically suspended or sacked from their once cast-iron jobs - a particularly encouraging sign given that over 10 per cent of all Italian MPs are full university professors.

Note: This article first appeared in The Guardian on June 16 1998.