The Banalization of Sexual Harassment That Produces Silencing in the Brazilian Academic Context of Management

Abstract

Sexual harassment remains a persistent and structural form of gendered violence in academic institutions. In this article, we investigate how its banalization operates as both a consequence and a mechanism of silencing in the Brazilian field of academic management. Drawing on six in-depth interviews with women scholars and students, we employ coding-based narrative analysis to explore how harassment is normalized, dismissed, and rendered invisible. We argue that banalization and silencing constitute a self-reinforcing dynamic sustained by coloniality, which functions as an ontological structure. This triad: coloniality, banalization, and silencing, helps to explain how sexual harassment is normalized and rendered invisible within academic institutions. Our contribution includes a conceptual model that identifies four structural axes—symbolic-cultural normalization, epistemological ambiguity, psychological internalization, and legal-institutional voids—which mediate the trivialization of harassment. This paper calls for a shift from individualized understandings of violence to collective accountability and structural transformation, particularly in institutions historically shaped by colonial gendered norms.