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By Vero Ferrari 

Once again, a Minister of Education in Peru is being questioned by Congress to clarify certain issues regarding the work of her Ministry. Following Kuczynski's resignation and the new term of President Martín Vizcarra, anti-rights groups have once again targeted the Ministry of Education. Last time, the then-Minister of Education, Daniel Alfaro, was the target of these attacks. Initially hesitant, but later more composed, Alfaro defended the public policy that mandates the State to implement a gender perspective across all its levels. Alfaro's tenure lasted only as long as Vizcarra's term as Prime Minister. Today, with a new Prime Minister and a new Minister of Education, the dispute continues.

All because of a link

Flor Pablo hasn't even been at the Ministry for two months. The results of her work are still unknown, but she has already been questioned by members of parliament with ties to churches, sects, and fundamentalist ideologies. The reason? A link in a textbook for third-year secondary school students. This link is in a marginal note in the text, and if copied into a search engine, it leads to a Cuban education website that explains various concepts of sexuality (oral sex, anal sex, etc.).

There would be nothing wrong with students knowing about these concepts; in fact, they probably already know them since they are teenagers between 13 and 14 years old. However, their inclusion was used by conservatives to rail against the entire book and spread lies about it, claiming it contains pornographic material and encourages students to participate in orgies at school . The minister, barely a few weeks into her term, was summoned to explain these events before the Congressional Education Committee, and she stumbled: she admitted that the links were a mistake and stated that those responsible for the content would be investigated, fired, and sanctioned.

This sparked a wave of protests from those who, until then, had supported the Ministry's educational policies despite all the conservative attacks and the sometimes weak, sometimes strong stance of Peru's governing body for education. Even President Vizcarra echoed the minister's sentiments, lamenting "the mistake." What did this lead to? Well, siding with the anti-rights movement is tantamount to handing your life to the government. The minister was summoned for questioning, and her resignation was sought. But this story goes back further.

The Supreme Court in favor of the gender approach

On April 3, the Supreme Court of Peru dismissed in its entirety the class-action lawsuit filed by the group "Parents in Action" against the gender perspective. This lawsuit, filed in January 2017, sought to remove the gender perspective from public education policies under the pretext that parents had not been consulted. The Ministry of Education demonstrated that the consultation had indeed taken place, that the gender perspective was necessary to reduce violence against women, and that public policies were determined by the State.

After two years of a tough battle, in which the economic power of misogynistic churches and sects clashed with a civil society that struggles to organize itself, we could say that we had won one of the most important battles: the legal one.

The culture war continues, but they are increasingly being defeated by their own words and actions. The independent press and feminism have dealt them a heavy blow, exposing who they are and what their true intentions are.

[READ ALSO: The Peruvian Court ruled in favor of the gender approach in schools]

Various investigations by journalistic portals managed to discover, through meticulous work, not only where all the money behind the most fundamentalist evangelical churches came from, but also their acts of corruption , their political alliances, and their criminal and mafia-like activities .

For almost a year, "Parents in Action" presented themselves as the representatives of the interests of Peruvian children and adolescents until "Mothers in Action" emerged to challenge them. This group featured real mothers with children in schools in Lima's most populous districts—women who knew what they were talking about because it was their own children receiving the poor education to which Peruvians are accustomed.

[READ ALSO: #Peru: The ideology of hate against the LGBTIQ community]

It wasn't a group of religious lobbyists interested in promoting their fundamentalist agenda in Peruvian education, like "Parents in Action." It was a group of mothers, without many economic resources, but with a strong desire to do something, concerned about the violence their daughters and sons experience. They burst onto the public scene, defended the necessity and urgency of a gender perspective in every forum where it was debated, and they won. The Supreme Court ruled in their favor: the interest of those who want an education without a gender perspective is to prevent girls from becoming empowered and developing the tools to protect themselves from violence—violence they experience from a very young age and that affects women's lives until the day they die.

Book burning and the Peruvian heartland

But all of this was only happening in Lima. In other regions of Peru, reaching the few forces confronting the members of the "Don't Mess With My Children" group with a more encouraging message was more difficult. This organization has infiltrated the poorest areas of Peru, where the Catholic Church has lost influence and no longer provides solutions to the population's real problems. The burning of books belonging to the Ministry of Education in Huancayo and Cusco left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. Now they were capable of burning state property that helps their children get ahead and stay away from violence.

Hate speech in Congress

The message from pastor and congressman Julio Rosas on May 9, the day of the interpellation, leaves no room for doubt: “If we want to save the children, we will save them. And know that salvation is written in blood .”

They want to escalate the levels of violence against women and LGBTQ+ people, Rosas's main rallying cry, one of the founders of "Don't Mess With My Children." This call, disguised as religious rhetoric, only makes sense in a context of entrenched fanaticism. It is a call for that fanaticism to commit acts of violence in the name of the children they claim to defend.

Several congressmen gave speeches worse than the last, confusing terms or outright lying, but one won the prize for utter ignorance: Tamar Arimborgo, the representative of Loreto, a region in the Peruvian jungle that, contrary to her, is making progress in the recognition of sexual diversity thanks to LGBTI activism.

The Fujimorista congresswoman stated that "the function of sex is reproduction, not pleasure," which initially caused surprise, because it is indeed surprising that someone who can say such things reaches Parliament. Then it generated laughter and a trending topic under the hashtag #LaSexólogaArimborgo (The Sexologist Arimborgo), where her anachronistic beliefs were mocked. Finally, it produced serious concern: Arimborgo's discourse is that of those who have denied women the enjoyment of sexuality for centuries, those who believe that women are merely empty vessels in which to discharge their desires, those who believe they have the right to mutilate the clitorises of girls and adolescents because they don't have the right to pleasure. It's a joke, but it's also hate speech, and that's what conservatives feed on. Then they translate it, interpret it, say it differently, but at its core, that's what it is: the control of women's sexuality.

Yesterday, despite everything, the Minister of Education emerged stronger. She answered all the questions about Peruvian education policy correctly for over eight hours, and she had the support of both government and left-wing congressmen, as well as public opinion. Meanwhile, the congressmen opposed to the approach gave shameful speeches one after another, taking us back two centuries to a past we don't want to return to. That is their dream, one we will continue to thwart with all our might.