BarcelonaA letter from a group of fourteen people sent to the rector of the University of Barcelona, Joan Guàrdia, denounces the professor – now emeritus – Ramon Flecha to have sex “in a context of clear hierarchical inequality” with “students, scholarships, doctoral students or subordinates”, according to RTVE notice, Radio 4, Radio 4, Radio Eldiario.es i Infolibre. The same professor has been judicially pursuing the ARA newspaper for five years for publishing, in 2016, that they had denounced their research group, the CREA (Community of Research on Excellence for All), accusing him of acting as a sect, a complaint that was completed after a year.
The four media say that in the last year 24 researchers have left CREA for reasons related to this complaint and talked to six women who say that Flecha asked them for sex between 2000 and 2019, as specifically. Eldiario.es. The women maintain that when they collaborated with Crea or were students, Flecha proposed appointments out of work, asking for massages, doing them housework, used excuses for sleeping with them on work trips, and even asked for sex or felt pushed to have them. The UB has admitted to the ARA that the Rector “has received the letter from a lawyer” related to this case that its legal services have already answered, but says it is confidential, as the answer.
The ARA has contacted Flecha, who reverses the situation and attacks witnesses and complainants. He says what the four media have done is “interviewing only the people who have allegedly assaulted the victims” and that “the first thing to do is talk to the victims.” “Whenever I have supported a victim, the aggressors have threatened me that they would destroy me inventing everything that was needed to do so,” he adds.
Court prosecution
Ramon Flecha and who succeeded him as director of CREA, also the professor of sociology at the UB Marta Soler, sued the Ara newspaper in 2020 by the article “They denounce a UB research group accusing it of acting as a sect”, published by this journalist five years earlier. As a result of a press conference by CREA, the article explained that several members of the university community had reported the research group and that these complaints were added to others from 2004, which had led the university to do internal research and carry it to the prosecution. He also gave the version of CREA members who spoke at a press conference. However, the news of the files were also published, Flecha and Soler alleged that the ARA had built a “completely false story” and that the article was a “serious and intense violation of the right to honor.”
The 2022 arrow I soler van demand l ‘Now Balearic Is and this journalist for the same article, which was also originally published in the ‘Now Balearic Isand they also claimed 30,000 euros for “moral damage”. The two court proceedings are still active.
An internal research of the UB
Despite these demands, the UB’s internal investigation had collected enough doubts about the research group that led Flecha and Soler to take it to the prosecutor’s office. The “previous and reserved information” commissioned by the Professor of Law Enoch Albertí and made from interviews with 19 people spoke “of very intense private interference”, with “strongly personalist leadership”. The report, which the ARA had accessed, said that CREA’s investigation had “especially” shown “” particularly serious “behaviors, such as” performing sexual insinuations and, in some cases, conducting behaviors that the affected people have lived as sexual harassment. ” This statement was made mainly as a result of the testimony of a victim to whom Albertí had made a statement.
The report also stated that the operation of the CREA group created “a remarkable confusion” between the professional and personal spheres of its members, which led to “sectarian behaviors”. He proposed that a “rigorous inspection” be made on the operation of the CREA, an economic audit and even that the UB intervened the group.
The CREA research group, founded by Ramon Flecha, has been carrying controversy inside and outside the university for at least twenty years, but this does not prevent its founder from being presented as a pioneer of Me Too at the University. It is defined in its three x profiles as the “scientist n. 1 (world ranking) in gender -based violence”. Two years ago, in an article in The newspaperhe asserted that it was “an aberration” that the relationships between students and teachers were allowed, because “there is a clear inequality of power between the parties and because, in the case, the students are in a clear situation of vulnerability in the event of an eventual abuse”.
The Code of Ethics of the University
Last year the UB modified its ethical code and included two significant novelties. At first, he described the “sex -affective” malpractice between teaching and research staff and students “, because they are” clearly asymmetric “and with a clear” component of superiority “. He also now also says that “the freedom of chair and academic does not authorize the existence of sectarian organizations” or groups with methods “contrary to fundamental rights”. The UB flatly breaks these changes in the CREA case.
CREA has not been affiliated with the University of Barcelona since 2020, according to a statement from the UB, but still has a web page under its domain where it creates it says that it has two research groups: the Sociological Theory Research Group and Social Impact of Research (TSIR), of the UB School of Sociology, and the Research Group on Supering Education of inequalities (GRESUD), of the Faculty of Education of the UB.
