There’s a lot of public debate about Title IX, but the campus offices that investigate complaints under the law tend to work behind closed doors. A forthcoming book aims to pry them open.
For On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence (University of California Press), Nicole Bedera was granted an unusual level of access to Title IX proceedings at a large public university, which she doesn’t name. Bedera sat in on meetings, read case files, and interviewed the students and employees who reported sexual assault, those who faced accusations, and administrators tasked with handling the cases.
Many of the claimants Bedera features didn’t seek the incredibly onerous investigations she details. They wanted accommodations for classes or housing but ended up in complex proceedings that were designed to protect the institution and tended to yield outcomes favoring the accused, Bedera argues.
That’s harmful to students who come forward about sexual violence and expect their colleges to take action, Bedera told The Chronicle. Some students experience “institutional betrayal,” a sociological term describing how lack of support from an institution violates trust. Students who say they’ve endured institutional betrayal, Bedera writes, “report traumatic symptoms similar to those victims who were raped twice.”
The book’s grim conclusions are tempered with a hopeful presentation of proposed reforms. “Campus sexual violence is a persistent social problem — but not because it’s impossible to solve,” Bedera writes. For instance, she said, colleges can give students who report sexual assault more agency in how campus investigations move forward. While it’s an academic book, she believes it’s accessible to administrators and students going through Title IX processes.
Bedera conducted the study for her dissertation at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she earned a Ph.D. in sociology. Her book will be released in October. She spoke with The Chronicle about her experience embedded in a Title IX office, misconceptions about campus sexual violence, and professors’ role in supporting students who experience harm. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The cases you look at in this book are different from the stereotypical scenarios — you call it “party rape” — that people picture when they hear about Title IX and campus sexual violence. What are some misconceptions you’d like to correct about these issues?
This narrative of university party rape has a really convenient scapegoat with this idea that, “If you choose to drink, this is what can happen to you.” A lot of us who spend time on campuses talking to college administrators about sexual violence know that the conversation quickly turns to, ‘If only we could get these kids to drink less.’ And that really misses the root of the problem, which is not alcohol, but inequality, sexism, and misogyny.
But more broadly, Title IX is not just about violence. One of the things that was surprising to me was how much of the office’s day-to-day work is about other forms of sex discrimination. Things like differential treatment between men and women in specific settings, and just the sort of garden-variety sexual harassment. I think that so much of the focus being on this one story about rape in a party setting makes everything else seem like it’s not that bad, at least as administrators saw it. Because if they could be responding to rape or life-threatening partner violence, anything else on that continuum of harm seemed unworthy of school intervention to some.
A lot of the cases in the book are focused on graduate students and researchers in the workplace. How are those dynamics different from undergraduate students?
In interviewing grad students for this project, the degree to which violence and violence facilitation by the faculty was accepted really struck me. It could seem like there was nothing that could be done, that if you came forward you could lose your funding, or your lab, or access to the whole education you’re here to get. So, the reality is the violence that’s affecting grad students is a lot more difficult to respond to with the Title IX system.
There’s actually research from the last decade or so that says grad students might be at a higher risk for sexual violence than undergrads. One of the alarming things from that research is that the perpetrators are often faculty, and that’s really difficult for universities to confront.
You also argue that a lot of the cases in the book raise intersectional questions that go beyond just gender discrimination. Is that something people should be thinking about?
When we talk about sexual violence, campus sexual violence in particular, there is a centering of white, straight women. But they’re actually the minority of victims. [The pseudonymous] Western University is a predominantly white institution, but the number of survivors in my study who are straight white women is less than 20 percent.
So much of what allows all of us to sleep at night after sexual violence takes place, and then nothing happens, is that intersection with racism, homophobia, and ableism. These institutions as a whole value the students who were victims less, not just on their gender, but on their identities as a whole.
Why do you think people don’t hear much about the broader spectrum of what Title IX cases look like and who’s involved?
When the survivors lost trust in their institutions’ ability to help them, they lost trust in a lot of social institutions. Most of the survivors I interviewed never tried to file a lawsuit or go to the press. They wouldn’t even dream of it because it was hard to trust other institutions.
There are also real barriers to coming forward, and that’s where the intersectionality piece comes in. The idea that there’s somebody with a Rolodex and resources who can get a lawyer or find a good journalist didn’t really fit when the victim was a 35-year-old single mother who was really focused on getting her kids to school.
We’ve established that the book is a rather dark read, but I was struck by how each section ends with a lot of hope. Do you think a reader is too optimistic or naïve if they finish this book feeling like the challenges surrounding colleges’ responses to sexual assault are solvable?
No. When I left the field and was talking about some findings, people would ask me: ‘Are you just so depressed? Do you feel like it’s impossible to move forward?’ But I felt the opposite.
The thing that causes me distress is that solutions are known. We know what we have to do to end gender-based violence. To some degree, even the policies that schools have would be a huge step if they actually followed them. The problem is that there hasn’t been a willingness to do it.
Can the solutions you talk about in the book be enacted on an individual campus if it has the right leadership? Or is it a political problem for state legislatures and federal rules?
It’s more of a political question than one for campuses. Universities have a real vested interest in maintaining their power over crime on campus, so it would be naïve to expect them to lead the change. For example, it’s beneficial for a university to be able to decide the results of a sexual-misconduct case against the most prestigious professor who brings in a lot of grant money and attention to the school.
The period studied in the book coincides with the Trump-era Title IX rules. Now we have new regulations from the Biden administration. As the election nears, what are you watching for?
Regardless of the outcome of the election, I think there needs to be a real push to restore a lot of the rights that Trump stripped from survivors. The Biden administration didn’t go far enough to restore those rights.
Is that possible?
One thing that’s stunned me, in talking about this book and working on this project, is how many survivors are still thinking about what happened to them on college campuses. This kind of trauma, institutional betrayal, leaves a lifelong mark in the same way that the violence itself leaves a lifelong mark. So, I think there is a lot of interest in changing things and there could be a lot of political will there.
Is there anything else you think is important that we haven’t touched on?
Yes. What would I want professors to do to make things better for their students?
Professors are sort of side characters in the book. I didn’t interview any unless they were a party in a case. That said, the survivors I interviewed talked about professors a lot. They were controlling so much of their lives.
There’s an assumption that faculty should be able to handle their classrooms however they want, and that’s both promising and perilous. It’s perilous because some were making things really hard on victims and whistle-blowers and witnesses. But it’s promising because with so little oversight, faculty who want to do right by survivors absolutely can.
It would be so helpful for professors to think through offering not just a standard accommodation, but having a real discussion about what will actually be most useful for the student’s education.
