Violence Against Women Isn't "Culture": My Experience Studying Abroad

During the first week of study abroad, my program offered an informational session about street harassment to the 35 students enrolled (29 of whom are women). The area of the city in which we were studying is renowned for its conservativism. Few street lights illuminate the endless maze of narrow alleys that lead to our homes and there’s virtually no police presence, so the session seemed warranted.

I could talk about the content of this orientation, but I feel it is most important to acknowledge my disappointment with the program's choice to label what women in Morocco experience as “street harassment.” In actually, this experience is a form of violence against women and should be acknowledged as such. Walking down the street and being unwontedly touched is a form of violence. Being followed to your door step by a large group of men is a form violence. Being slammed against a wall in the middle of a street and screamed at is a form of violence. Witnessing women openly being abused in public by their male partners is a form of violence — for both the victim and the individuals made to watch. Additionally, the female students of color on my program were frequently sexualized in a different, heightened manner than the white female students — an experience of compounded racism and sexism that resulted in a feeling of dehumanization that clearly warrants institutional support.

Given these experiences, many of my peers and I have requested to speak with a female psychologist. Program representatives repeatedly told us that this request is “unreasonable” and that they were “sorry that they couldn’t provide a therapist that looks like everyone.” Not only was the idea that students may want gender-specific psychological care for a gender-specific issue dismissed, but one of my peers also discovered that students are only offered a single session — an experience another female friend of mine found on her own study abroad program in a different country as well.

Not only have many female students been unable to access care for the trauma of dealing with this daily violence, but they are also victim blamed. Women who complained were both made to feel ridiculous for feeling these experiences were traumatic in the first place and that we didn’t deserve support because this experience was what we “signed up for.” Rather than acknowledge their responsibility to provide female students with adequate resources, my abroad institution asked us to desensitize ourselves to violence and perpetuated the idea that doing so was our duty.

In addition to victim blaming, this stance also perpetuated the idea that violence can be a normalized aspect of a nation’s culture more broadly, and that this violence was part of our overall “cultural” immersion. When students asked the program why they placed us in an area with a particularly high concentration of violence, we were told it was to experience “authentic" culture — as if some experiences can be more culturally "authentic” than others and that violence is just an aspect of a society to be observed and acknowledged rather than protested.

Although my abroad institution prohibits students in this region from traveling internationally during the course of the program, I asked to leave the country to seek support from my sister in Europe after a particularly traumatic experience. My request was denied even though the student handbook lists medical emergencies and family matters as appropriate reasons to request leaving. In an email response to my request, a program representative told me that I had to remain in the country in order to fully complete my “cultural immersion“ and that “needing a cultural break is not considered an extenuating [enough] circumstance [to leave the country].” In fact, I would argue that neither of my requests address culture or qualify as a "cultural break": My mental health a highly personal matter and violence against women, as studies show, is near universal, not a normalized cultural phenomenon. Regardless, I was threatened with having my credit for the semester taken away should I leave the country to seek other resources.

All of these components coalesced into an environment in which female students simply felt unsafe in an enduring way. Roxane Gay aptly described this feeling in an essay entitled “The Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion.”

“The illusion of safety is as frustrating as it is powerful,” she wrote. “We all have history. You can think you’re over your history. You can think the past is the past. And then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. The past is always with you.”

Fear is isolating. It has the power to grab you and drag you away from the present, drag you away from the ones you love, drag you away from your sense of self. Gay is right: Safety is an illusion. I can dream of a peaceful world , but it would be foolish to currently walk through life without anticipating danger or harm.

What I take issue with, therefore, is the neglectful responses and policies of my study abroad institution and the more generally problematic way we dismiss violence against women and sustain victim-blaming through that dismissal. The model that my abroad institution, as well as other institutions like it, perpetuates regarding this matter is unacceptable. It’s high time we find a more productive way to discuss, honor, and offer solutions for the different types of trauma women experience across a variety of cultural identities the world over.