A group of male university students have been condemned in Spain after footage showed them yelling misogynistic threats at a neighbouring all-girls college residence.
Spanish prosecutors have launched a criminal hate crime investigation over the viral video, which prime minister Pedro Sanchez denounced as demonstrating “inexplicable, unjustified and absolutely repugnant behaviour”.
In the footage, a man can be seen shouting from a sole unshuttered window at Madrid’s Elias Ahuja residence, in the direction of the nearby Santa Monica female-only dorm: “Wh***s, come out of your holes like rabbits, you are f****ing nymphomaniacs.”
The individual threatened to make the women submit at a “capea” – a party organised around bullfighting – as scores of his fellow residents, in a choreographed display, simultaneously appeared at other windows across the multi-storey building, turning on lights, banging on shutters, and jeering intimidatingly.
Madrid’s regional prosecutor’s office said the anti-discrimination group Movement Against Intolerance had filed a complaint against the students for an alleged hate crime, announcing on Friday that it had launched an investigation.
The prosecutor’s office said it had asked police to relay all relevant information in their possession regarding the incident.
The residence’s management said several people in the footage had been identified and expelled from the property, and that others would take part in mandatory awareness-raising and volunteering activities.
The Complutense University of Madrid’s vice chancellor Rosa de la Fuente said it had also launched an investigation into the incident as a prelude to possible disciplinary measures.
However, in an online letter some residents at Santa Monica defended the men, saying that – although the language in the footage was “inadequate and disrespectful – it represented a “traditional practice between student residences” with no intention of denigrating women.
“A viral video is easy to misinterpret without understanding its context,” the letter said, adding: “An impression of hatred and machismo has been created, which could not be further from the truth.”
Others, however, were more critical.
One resident said: “Like the rest of my colleagues, the ones that took part and those like me that didn’t, we are ashamed and sad because those insults are intolerable, above all because of the image of the residency that they present ... which doesn’t reflect reality.”
While many political leaders of all stripes joined the prime minister in condemning the footage, Madrid’s populist regional leader Isabel Diaz Ayuso, of the right-wing Popular Party, said she was surprised that prosecutors would investigate this instead of unspecified “other things” taking place daily at universities.
But the Popular Party’s leader, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, called for Spain “to finish with these intolerable sexist attitudes”.
Mr Sanchez, who leads the Socialist Party, said: “We should not give any excuse for these behaviours which surely don’t represent the general feeling of Spanish society.
“I think it’s important that all political parties and the media express a clear ‘no’ to these macho behaviours, and do not give a take a single step back on real equality between men and women.”
Mr Sanchez’s government has sought to take strides in clamping down abusive language and behaviour against women, strengthening rape laws earlier this year with a new legal definition based on explicit consent, with long-awaited legislation dubbed “only yes means yes”.
A survey last year found that one in five men in Spain between the ages of 15 and 29 did not believe that gender violence was real, viewing it only as an “ideological invention”.
Additional reporting by Reuters
