Paola Guzmán Albarracín: Analytical Dimensions of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in the Educational Setting

Abstract

This article analyzes gender-based violence within the Ecuadorian educational context, focusing on how this issue has become institutionalized through public policies and educational guidelines, particularly in the country’s schools. The study examines the various manifestations of this violence and how it is shaped alongside other conditions such as social class, ethnicity, and gender. The research is grounded in normative human rights standards and employs critical analytical tools from gender studies. Through a specific case, used as an illustrative example rather than a detailed case study, the article provides a panoramic analysis that helps to understand the mechanisms of social reproduction of violence. From a Latourian perspective (2008), it explores how mandates of masculinity are perpetuated within the educational system.

The work reveals the multiple dimensions in which violence is articulated within the educational sphere, considered a crucial space where diverse forms of intersectional violence converge and collide. The analysis considers how gender intertwines with other categories such as social class and race, creating complex dynamics in which social hierarchies are associated with multiple other social and legal dimensions. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative approach that includes an exhaustive review of academic literature, normative analysis, and the study of poststructuralist authors from sociology and gender studies.

This article goes beyond mere legal description to offer a critical and in-depth analysis of the structures that sustain gender-based violence in Ecuadorian education. It concludes that, although there is a robust national and international legal framework protecting women and girls who are victims of gender and sexual violence, the various expressions in which violence emerges are central both to the interpretation of the law and the establishment of mandates of masculinity that—as in the case of Guzmán Albarracín—result in prejudiced gender stereotypes and provoke greater violations of rights that have not been properly addressed by judicial bodies, as well as forms of epistemic injustice.