Nicole Bedera is a sociologist and sexual violence researcher. She studies how our social structures contribute to survivors’ traumas and makes sexual violence more likely to occur in the future. Her scholarship has influenced anti-violence programming across the country, including for Planned Parenthood, and her work has been featured in many popular outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, Time Magazine, and Teen Vogue. Nicole is an Affiliated Educator at the Center for Institutional Courage. She puts her work into practice as a Co-Founder of Beyond Compliance Consulting. Here, I ask her about her new book, On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors, which is out now from University of California Books. You can find out more about Nicole at her website. And you can follow her on Twitter @NBedera

AMW: How do universities protect perpetrators and their own reputations at the expense of survivors?

NB: There is this general perception that the Title IX process is “neutral” and “fair”—or perhaps that “the pendulum has swung too far” and survivors are now favored. It just isn’t true. We have data that demonstrates the average university expels one perpetrator every three years. We know that this number has dropped even lower since Obama left office. Our schools protect perpetrators (and, in some ways, themselves) by failing to hold wrongdoers accountable, even when they have obviously violated school policy and pose an ongoing violent threat to the campus community.

Something that can get lost in this discourse—a discourse that mostly focuses on how to treat perpetrators—is that the failure to intervene hurts survivors. Most of the time, survivors who turn to Title IX are still in danger and hoping their school will step in to keep them safe. Or they’re coming forward because their perpetrator’s behavior is interfering in their capacity to do well in school. A university that refuses to take action isn’t just failing to deliver justice. They’re causing harm and keeping survivors from accessing the education that brought them to school in the first place.

A simple example might be useful here. Early in the book, I tell the story of a survivor named Brie who had enrolled in the same class as her perpetrator. The class covered material on sexual violence, which was unthinkably difficult for Brie to navigate with the man who had violated her sitting a few seats away. When Brie turned to her school for help, they couldn’t offer her a single solution that would allow her to stay in class. Instead, administrators focused on her perpetrator’s “due process rights” and encouraged her to drop any class he enrolled in. So she did. And in the process, Brie learned that her education was less valuable to her university than her perpetrator’s.

In the book, I get into a lot of other specific institutional mechanisms that prioritize the protection of perpetrators over the safety and education of survivors. But in each example, the overarching theme is the same: perpetrators were shielded from the consequences of their actions and survivors were expected to bear the burdens of the violence and their school’s decision to protect and empower their perpetrators.

AMW: How does the Title IX Office intensify rather than address gender inequality?

NB: There are a lot of ways to answer this question, but I want to focus on two.

In my interviews with Title IX staff, I was struck by the hostile attitudes they had toward women who filed complaints. Feminist researchers and activists have long-established the kinds of rape myths survivors encounter when they come forward, but I was still surprised by how little had changed. The staff has received trauma-informed crisis counseling certifications! They worked at a university alongside nationally-renowned sexual violence researchers! Their explicit goal was to promote gender equity on campus! And still, they repeated the same gendered stereotypes and wove them into their decision-making in cases.

For a lot of people who entered the Title IX Office, this meant Title IX itself became a second site of gendered harm. A victim of sexual harassment would be expected to endure more sexual harassment in the form of an investigator making off-the-cuff comments about how men and women should behave in an educational or professional setting. A victim of stalking would be expected to endure more stalking as investigators pried into their social media accounts to find evidence to discredit them, often without the victim’s knowledge or consent. And sometimes, these acts of violence escalated. All but one victim advocate at the university had a story to tell about Title IX staff sexually harassing or assaulting them.

If survivors spoke up about this gendered mistreatment, they worried it would affect the outcome of their case. So they endured their institutional betrayals as the Title IX Office retraumatized them.

This bring me to my second point. If Title IX is working as the law intended, then it should be a given that engaging the Title IX Office should make it easier for a survivor to do well in school. But I actually found the opposite. Survivors found that reporting a sexual assault to their school made their education even harder.

Obviously, a piece of that difficulty is the retraumatization I described. But not all of it. Title IX investigators made survivors jump through a series of hoops to prove they were “credible” victims. And often, those tests required sacrificing educational opportunities for the sake of their investigations. Survivors were chastised for asking to reschedule meetings that would interfere with their classes. They were expected to stop studying during finals week to review evidence on an investigator’s timeline. If they failed to sacrifice enough, then their cases were closed.

And, remember, their cases almost always ended in institutional inaction. All of the sacrifices ultimately offered survivors nothing except damage to their educations.

AMW: What is a path forward that reclaims the mission of Title IX?

NB: As it stands, our national Title IX approach has been to hand power back to schools to decide how—and if—they want to comply with the law. It is obvious that we can’t trust them with the task. It’s a conflict of interest. Survivors’ needs often directly contradict institutional objectives and, overwhelmingly, schools prioritize themselves.

We need independent third parties to take the reins. And it isn’t unprecedented. In 2022, California made campus victim advocates employees of the state. They still work in campus offices and provide direct services to students, but they are no longer hired or fired based on their willingness to put the school first. Instead, they can prioritize victims in accordance with the fundamental tenets of victim advocacy.

There have been other benefits too. California set state-wide standards about things like how many victim advocates there should be per student and the kinds of services that must be funded. On a lot of campuses, this meant developing a victim advocacy program for the first time or offering services that had never been available before—like legal support for students who want to sue a school that infringed upon their rights.

There are a lot of third parties I would trust more than our schools. Rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, and other gender equity-focused organizations have proven track records supporting survivors. There are plenty of people prepared to answer the challenges of this particular moment. We just need to give them the resources to take action.

For educators who want to assign On the Wrong Side to their students, Nicole created free teaching resources, including syllabus statements, lesson planning ideas, and an article on trauma-informed pedagogy.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity. She is the current editor of the Council of Contemporary Families blog and serves as Senior Fellow with CCF. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter at @AliciaMWalker1 and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd