The Deconstruction of False Victimhood and the Urgency of Safeguarding the University Community

Contemporary public debate frequently suffers from a deliberate semantic emptying, driven by ideological and discursive conveniences. Among the most severely distorted terms is the concept of "victimhood." In its strict and pejorative sense, victimhood defines the systematic tendency to transfer responsibility for individual failures to third parties, stagnating the subject in a posture of chronic passivity—like the student who sabotages their own attendance through negligence and later protests against failing a course. In recent institutional politics, we have witnessed almost caricatured manifestations of this phenomenon: individuals who plan democratic disruptions in detail with abundant audiovisual records, or who invade the headquarters of the three branches of government, destroying public property, only to subsequently claim "political persecution" or "oppression" when facing due process and indictment. In these cases, victimhood operates as a rhetorical shield to evade the obvious causal link between one's own actions and their criminal consequences.

However, there is an insurmountable dividing line between this discursive subterfuge and the material condition of actually being a victim. There is no victimhood when an individual is made vulnerable by predictable and avoidable elements that escape their personal control, but which fall directly within the sphere of duty of the State or its institutions. Systemic oppression, structural violence, and the glaring failure to guarantee the most basic fundamental rights—such as physical integrity and life—are not subjective impressions; they are concrete facts. It is precisely through this lens of perfectly avoidable negligence that one must analyze the security crisis plaguing the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), which disproportionately and alarmingly affects the student body, especially women.

Autonomous Mobilization in the Face of Fear

The denunciation of chronic insecurity on UFSC campuses does not emerge from bureaucratic offices, but rather from the limit of tolerance of those who experience daily university life under the constant shadow of fear. The trigger for the most recent wave of collective indignation was the arrest of a suspect in an attempted rape near the university. Far from being an isolated episode, the event served as the spark for dissatisfaction bottled up for years, culminating in the autonomous organization of a women's group that quickly reached the impressive milestone of nearly a thousand members.

The very existence and massive scale of this collective expose the size of the gap left by the university's central administration. In the absence of effective institutional protection mechanisms, the students themselves found themselves forced to spearhead support and case-sharing networks, exchange strategic information on routes and prevention tactics, formulate emergency action guidelines, and, ultimately, coordinate group departures and self-defense classes. This organic mobilization resulted in forceful protests and a rigorous collection of testimonies that translate the human cost of administrative inaction into dramatic terms.

Student Housing as a Frontier of Violence

Among the testimonies collected, the extreme vulnerability of spaces that should serve as a guarantee of dignified and safe student retention stands out. The testimony of one of the students synthesizes the gravity of the barbarism permitted by the institution's physical neglect:

> "I was stabbed inside the student housing because of a fight over a room. The guy was not a UFSC student, but in court they made up a story that he was there to take the entrance exam. Student housing is a clear example of how we are not safe within the university space. The main gate always malfunctions and is left open at some point during the year. Many people who have no connection to the university visit and sleep there. It was an attempted femicide against me and three other girls. The attacker walked away on foot from the housing after stabbing us. To this day, years after the incident, he has not been convicted."

This dramatic account does not point to an unavoidable act of nature, but rather a tragedy directly facilitated by operational omission. The lack of strict access control, the poor and neglected maintenance of gates, and the absence of active surveillance transform the student assistance apparatus into a high-risk zone, subjecting socioeconomically vulnerable students to life-threatening dangers.

Emergency and Structural Interventions

To mitigate the state of insecurity in which the university community is immersed, it is imperative that UFSC's central administration abandon its purely reactive stance and implement a contingency plan structured around three immediate pillars:

• Spatial and Environmental Revitalization: Modernization and expansion of the public lighting system across all areas of the campus; elimination of blind spots through the regular pruning and clearing of dense brush; and the immediate functional occupation or demolition of abandoned facilities, which currently serve as hiding places for potential attackers.
• Technological Strengthening of Monitoring: Substantial and integrated expansion of the closed-circuit television (CCTV) system, with the installation of high-resolution cameras in high-traffic areas and critical points, monitored in real time by an active security center.
• Resizing of the Security Force: An increase in the number of private security personnel and university guards, focusing on visible and preventive patrols, especially during the afternoon and night, ensuring perimeter protection of access points.

The Fallacy of Isolated Excellence

The Federal University of Santa Catarina rightfully boasts the title of the best public higher education institution in the state and ranks as the fifth-best federal university in the country. The quality of its faculty, the rigor of its scientific production, and the relevance of its university outreach are undeniable. However, maintaining these macrostructural indicators of academic excellence cannot be used as a smokescreen to hide the failure to manage its most basic and essential infrastructure.

The production of scientific knowledge loses its ethical legitimacy if it is achieved at the expense of the physical and mental integrity of those who produce it. The actual scenario points to a collective illness: frightened people being injured inside the campuses, developing severe psychological disorders, and abandoning classrooms due to the absence of minimal guarantees of survival. A university is defined, fundamentally, by the integrity of its human community. Preserving the lives of its students must invariably be the highest and non-negotiable priority of any serious university governance.