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On the eve of the International Day for the Elimination of Domestic Violence, attention was centred on the University of La Laguna (ULL) when an act of mindless vandalism brought the message home to roost.
Academic disrespect is treated as a serious issue by the University12.12.2015 - In support of the international event, a project called Sexism in the ULL - a range or murals with an 'equality' theme - was inaugurated in the faculty of journalism building. Unfortunately, on November 24, one of those murals was found defaced, with paint having been sprayed across it.
Both the AMEC Equal Opportunities Commission and the Equality Unit at the University issued a statement saying they condemned this double attack on a work of art and public and common area which had been decorated with a collage of newspaper articles about domestic violence.
The act of sabotage came just at the time when people all over the country were planning minutes of silence and other events to commemorate victims of domestic violence.
The AMEC Equality Commission said that the message in the mural was that violence is a gender-neutral phenomenon, with slogans such as ‘Neither feminism nor chauvinism - Violence has no gender’ being symbolic of total equality. They referred to the ignorance of the vandal, whose identity is unknown, who didn’t seem to understand the message that feminism and chauvinism are not comparable opposites: male chauvinism being said to be a historic structure based on the dominance of the male sex, while feminism is the effort to overcome existing inequality and to achieve a peaceful equilibrium, in which no gender is seen as superior to the other.