Something Was Wrong - S25 Ep20: Orchestrated Complexity in the Title IX System with Dr. Jacqueline Cruz

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

*Content Warning: sexual violence, institutional betrayal, rape, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, sexual assault, and abuse. Free + Confidential Resources + Safety Tips: somethingwaswrong.com/resources   Support Dr. Jacqueline Cruz:Beyond Compliance Consulting: https://www.beyond-compliance-consulting.com/ SWW Sticker Shop!: https://brokencyclemedia.com/sticker-shop SWW S25 Theme Song & Artwork: The S25 cover art is by the Amazing Sara Stewart instagram.com/okaynotgreat/ The S25 theme song is a cover of Glad Rag’s U Think U from their album Wonder Under, performed by the incredible Abayomi instagram.com/Abayomithesinger. The S25 theme song cover was produced by Janice “JP” Pacheco instagram.com/jtooswavy/ at The Grill Studios in Emeryville, CA instagram.com/thegrillstudios/ Follow Something Was Wrong: Website: somethingwaswrong.com  IG: instagram.com/somethingwaswrongpodcast TikTok: tiktok.com/@somethingwaswrongpodcast  Follow Tiffany Reese: Website: tiffanyreese.me  IG: instagram.com/lookieboo *Sources: -Cruz, Jacqueline. (2021). The Constraints of Fear and Neutrality in Title IX Administrators’ Responses to Sexual Violence. The Journal of Higher Education, 92(3), 363–384. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2020.1809268-Cruz, Jacqueline. “Gender Inequality in Higher Education: University Title IX Administrators’ Responses to Sexual Violence.” Google, New York University, 2020, scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=oHhHaTEAAAAJ&citation_for_view=oHhHaTEAAAAJ%3Ad1gkVwhDpl0C

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You think you know me, you don't know me well at all. You don't know. anybody till you talk to someone. Today we're joined by Dr. Jackie Cruz, a Title IX expert and adjunct faculty member at NYU, where she teaches in applied statistics, social science, and humanities. Dr. Cruz's research focuses on how Title IX systems operate in practice,

not just on paper. Her work examines how fear, institutional pressure, and the demand for so-called neutrality, shape decision-making inside universities, often in ways that constrain administrators and ultimately harm survivors. Rather than treating institutional failures as isolated mistakes, Dr. Cruz's research helps us understand how structural incentives, risk management, and cultural norms within higher education

can lead to patterns of institutional betrayal. As we explore the survivor experiences featured on this season of something was wrong, Dr. Cruz is here to help us contextualize what goes wrong, not just on an individual level, but systemically. Dr. Cruz, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you for having me. And I have to give a shout out to Dr. Bedera, who recommended that I speak with you and spoke so highly of you.

I'd love to hear how you guys know each other and your areas of specialty within Title IX in the areas that you're most passionate about? Yeah. So Dr. Bredera, Nicole, and I were both in grad school at the same time. And I was following her work a lot on Twitter. And I decided to reach out because a lot of our interest seemed to intersect. When we started talking, we found that our research, we were both studying Title IX in universities. And I was confined to many schools on the East Coast and she was in, I believe, the Midwest, and we were having very similar findings. It was really interesting to us. And so we developed a friendship from speaking about our research with one another. And then once we graduated, joined forces and started a consultancy called

Beyond Compliance to put our research into action. My research, what I look at is institutional responses to Title IX. I became interested because I looked at the Title IX landscape, which at the time was under the Obama administration, and I saw policy I thought should be really effective. And I saw that schools were spending millions of dollars on this new Title IX infrastructure that they really hadn't had before. And my question was, why does the landscape still look so bleak? there didn't seem to be a huge change in outcomes on the ground. This was also around the time of the hunting ground. And the big talking point, I think, was that schools were trying to protect their reputations

and therefore were just being awful to their students. While I did think that reputation did play a role in how universities were implementing their Title IX policies, there were all these Title IX officers and administrators associated with Title IX, and for me, I had no trouble thinking of them all as these evil villains who were showing up to work every day going, how could we further exploit survivors and not do anything about the issue of sexual violence on campuses? In my head, I said, these administrators probably have good intentions. They probably go to work and want to do a good job, and they probably on some level really want to stop discrimination. So for me, my question was,

happening. Why is there so much sexual violence still on college campuses? Why does it not seem like perpetrators are being held accountable? So for many students, they were saying that when they reported to their universities, that that process was more traumatic oftentimes than the assault that had occurred. And so there's this thing called institutional betrayal where students were feeling really betrayed by their institutions and that that was actually even sometimes more traumatic than the assault itself. And so I went and interviewed administrators at what I call selective universities. So public and private, selective just means slightly harder to get into. They have the smaller percentage of acceptance rates. And I looked up and down the East Coast

to understand what was going on. What I found was something that I call orchestrated complexity. I found that administrators, because of all the constraints they were under, the pressures that they were under from fear of being the bad guy, pressures about trying to seem neutral and unbiased. There were a lot of pressures and constraints that caused them to feel so anxious that what they would do is that they would create complexity around their sexual violence cases. So cases that seemed pretty straightforward where they had the evidence or where they believed that somebody had. done wrong. Instead of addressing that head-on, they would create complexity. They would say, oh, well, something happened. We just don't know what happened. Or they would use rape myths or other things to create a situation where they could say, this situation is so complicated, there's nothing that we could really do about it. I'm doing the best that I can, but this issue

will never be fixed. And that's the situation. I found that by doing that, by creating that complexity, It just reproduced the gender inequality that we continue to see on college campuses. How exactly is your research conducted for those who are not in the higher education space? How do you dig into these topics? For my research, something that surprised me was that a lot of administrators aren't really involved in the larger discussions around Title IX. They're not really invited to help create these policies. And so for me, I was really interested, how are they implementing Title IX in this? Really, for them, what must be like a really contentious landscape or challenging landscape.

And so what I did was that I just found Title IX officers. Sometimes they were deans. Sometimes they were their Title IX head person. They emailed a bunch of people at different universities and asked. them to speak with me about what their experiences were like being a Title IX administrator. It's pretty funny because when I was proposing my research, I got a lot of feedback and pushback that no one thought that in this very litigious society we live in that anyone would talk to me. But really, everyone that I emailed responded back to me except one person.

And I think that's because I went to them with a question that was just, what is your experience? like implementing Title IX. So I would go and I would have a conversation with these different administrators about Title IX. And I had some questions that I really wanted to hit with everyone, what brought them to the work, what did their day to day look like, what were moments where they felt successful and what were moments where they were challenged. It was really interesting to me because across these different administrators, there was so much shared experience, so much of the same language used, so many of the same issues that came to surface. And after I did my interviews and did my analysis, I began to see that all of them except one, who I called my resistor,

did orchestrate complexity around their roles. And orchestrated complexity was a big way that they implemented title line. What does that orchestrated complexity look like in practice? In practice, it looks like administration. saying we know something happened, we just don't know what happened. It was interesting. This was something I heard across interviews at different schools. Why that stands out to me as such a good example of orchestrated complexity is you're acknowledging that something happened. The creation of the complexity would be, but we don't know what happened. But then how do you know that something happened? And if you know that something happened, how don't you know what happened? It's a way

of having empathy for both sides, which is something that all the administrators talked about that they felt was a necessary part of their job responsibility. As a Title IX officer, their responsibility was to both sets of students, students who were accused of sexual violence and students who had experienced it. So respondents and claimants in their language. And what that pressure ended up doing was that they felt really reticent to hold a anyone accountable to say this student did something wrong to another student, that something did happen and that we have to hold that person accountable. Instead, they would come up with ways to empathize or champion both students by saying, we can't exactly pin this on the perpetrator.

And by doing this, by putting these competing layers of complexity, instead of saying, we know something happened, here's the evidence, and we're going to do something about it. It would land in this ambiguous territory where they could feel comfortable like they were supporting both sets of students. Another example of orchestrated complexity is I spoke with an administrator who said, I know that this male student, he did sexually assault this other student, but he was a virgin. And so he just didn't know what he was doing. And to me, that's orchestrated complexity because it's an acknowledgement that there was a sexual violent act. This person did this to another student. But the orchestrated complexity layer there is the use of these rape myths, like that virgin somehow cannot know what rape looks like.

And so therefore they can't perpetrate it. So it's a way of both holding the knowledge that an assault occurred, but also kind of a mechanism to not do much about it at the same time. Okay, picture this. It's midweek. Everyone's tired. I'm tired. And I'm standing in the kitchen trying to figure out what to make for dinner. and somehow it's always the same few meals on repeat.

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Disclaimer must order the third box by May 31st, 2006. Nothing hits like home cooking. Thank you so much. Do you feel that true objectivity is possible in the Title IX system where institutions are simultaneously investigators, adjudicators, risk managers, managing their own brand risk. I think objectivity is a tricky word. I mean, when you look at the law and you think about objectivity in terms of the law,

the law asks basically what a reasonable person would conclude given the facts. And so I think with an issue like this, if people are trained to actually be fair, if people are trained to look at the facts, if people are trained to understand the culture that we reside in. By that, I mean that we live in a culture where men are hardly ever called to account for the violence that they inflict on others. When you look at sexual violence in particular, when you really look at many famous cases, I think about the comic Louis C.K. And how he very much came out and admitted to sexually harassing two women comics. yet a popular response to that admission was, women, get over it.

His career shouldn't end because he was sexually violent. So we live in a culture and a society in which sexual violence is made to be in a lot of cases okay. We also live in a society in which a philosopher Kate Mann, she talks about the idea of empathy, in which our society gives a lot of empathy to men. When men do wrong, the cultural response, more often. and than not is to try to empathize with them. Oh, why did you do this? How do we move on from this instead of really being held accountable? When I think about objectivity, when I think about Title IX officers being able to actually address discrimination, I think there would be lots of

steps that would have to happen before that. And I think one of those would be the ability to assess their own understanding of the gender dynamics and gender politics of our culture, thinking about how power works with sexual violence, things like that. I don't think it's impossible. I think ultimately my research is hopeful because I think it's so hard to address a problem if you can't name it. My theory of orchestrated complexity gives a name to a problem that exists. And I think that if we were able to talk more openly about what Title IX is there for, and I think these institutions would be able to better address these issues. In addressing this, I think that sometimes that does get really tricky with this idea that a Title IX official's role is to protect and be there for both students.

I think that this is maybe a little nuance, but if your job is to end and to address, hold accountable people who are discriminating and doing violence to others, then that has to be the goal. I think that you can be fair to both sets of students. You can have a process where both sets of students have rights. Where it gets tricky, I think, is the actual accountability. the actual finding of someone doing wrongdoing and what comes after that. Now, my idea of accountability looks a little different. I think you could be supportive and hold somebody accountable.

With the administrators I spoke to, they had a very hard time with the idea that they could kick someone off campus or what would that mean? Would that mean that they were also supporting them as a student? So that's where I think it gets really tricky. But I don't think it's impossible. I just think it would mean switching a framework of how most people think about Title IX implementation. How do legal liability, donor pressure, reputational risk affect decision making? How honest can the system be when it feels like the system is in charge of checking itself? That's a good question.

These things do play a role. and how administrators were thinking about their job. They experienced fear-based environment where they were saying, I'm scared of losing my job, I'm scared of negative press, I'm scared of people being angry at me, I'm scared of people thinking that our university is awful.

And so those things were what I call constraints on their decision-making that did have a role. But I do also think that administrators and universities have an opportunity in doing the right thing. And by doing the right thing, I mean actually addressing gender discrimination, taking care of survivors, holding perpetrators accountable, and that that could translate into having a good reputation,

into fundraising more donor money. Many of the people who had universities look to certain sectors in their university, in their student populations and donor populations and think, okay, maybe going too hard and holding someone accountable won't make this donor class happy, but by doing the right thing, they could get another sector of students and donors who would, I think, gladly give money. I do think that these things play a role in the larger issue of why universities are not dealing with this issue as well or confronting it. I don't think it's the main reason by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that it could be a motivator with some creative

thinking, and this is what I wish for universities, that they could see, well, if we actually did what we're supposed to be doing. But a lot more women, a lot more survivors, a lot more people would actually support us, and that these things that we see as such negatives in thinking about why Title IX isn't working, could with a different framework be seen as things that could actually bolster Title IX implementation. I'm curious to know what patterns are you seeing repeated across different campuses and cases that you've studied? What I saw across all of these administrators was a real reluctance to hold perpetrators accountable. I saw across administrators a real fear of being seen as the bad guy. Something that they would say to me a lot was no one

will ever be happy. You could do the best job. No one will ever be happy. And so when you go into your job and it's already high-pressured. And you're thinking, no matter what I do, nobody will ever be happy. Well, that to me is just another way of orchestrating complexity. So no matter the situation, administrators were creating complexity around those cases to not have to act so that they could say I did as much as I could. No one will ever be happy. It's just so complicated. And we're not going to fix this right now. Another thing that I want to point out is that I found in my research, search across these administrators was that I call it secondhand trauma. One of the questions I asked was, what keeps you up at night? Across all my administrators, they spoke about how they have to

numb themselves to the horrible things they hear and see that they don't want to bring home with them. So there was this acknowledgement that they were hearing these awful experiences from students about sexual violence and that they had to really consciously do work to kind of numb themselves and to put a barrier between knowing that that happens and their own self. I think a lot of that had to do with that they felt that if they really were able to take in and really react to the awful things that were happening on their campuses, that they would be seen as biased. So instead of being seen as human and having evidence that shows that a horrible thing happened and that they are having an emotional reaction to that, they felt like they had to push themselves away and not feel that

or not even acknowledge that that was happening to them. I saw that across a lot of cases too, that it's not that nothing serious or real was ever brought to them. It's just that they really believe that so much of their role was to distance themselves from feeling anything, or or from acknowledging these acts of violence. That's what I say is that orchestrated complexity, it's not necessarily a conscious process. It's not something where an administrator is sitting there, like, let me create complexity around this

so that I don't have to do my job. It's more of an unconscious process. They don't want to be the bad guy. They feel fear in the environment. The university to fire me. We don't want everyone to hate us. Also, they're experiencing all the secondhand. trauma. But my job is really to support all students, so I have to have empathy for everyone. And if I

am really acknowledging that the student perpetrated this act of violence on another student, then how am I going to feel towards them? It's going to be hard for me to be empathetic. And then that's against my job. And so what do you do with all of these competing priorities? If at the end of the day, you think, no matter what you do, no one's going to be happy, the easiest thing to do is to create complexity to say, well, yes, he did it, but he's a virgin, he didn't know better, he didn't mean it. And it's so complicated, we're never going to fix this. So I'm just going to do the little bit that I can. And it goes on and on and on. They are existing in a culture that rarely holds men accountable. And now they're supposed to be the people who are holding men accountable.

You have to have a lot of courage. You have to have a lot of conviction to stand up for that. our culture goes into overdrive to make excuses for men who are sexually violent. If you look at the presidency right now, Donald Trump has said he grabs women by their private parts. He used a really not nice word. We have that on tape. We've all heard it. Yet our culture has gone kind of into overdrive in a way to be like, oh, okay, that's locker room talk. He has had lawsuits and accusations from multiple women, and yet he gets to be the president of the United States. We don't live in a culture that holds men accountable for sexual violence. I'm not saying that these are the right actions, but from my research, it's almost like an inevitable ending.

There isn't a reframing. If there isn't a standing up and a saying, like, actually, your role is to end gender discrimination. That's what this office is here for. This office isn't here to have empathy for everyone involved and to make sure nothing ever happens. The whole point of Title IX is to address gender discrimination. You mentioned Trump and his flippant comments about sexual assault. Does that impact the way administrators are looking at survivors' experiences? Yes, I think it definitely impacts. I would argue that it's not as large of.

an influence as maybe some other people would argue, because I think that ultimately what I have found throughout all three administrations that I've been researching in is that administrators continue to orchestrate complexity to deal with their cases. The one thing I will touch on, I think that changes, or for me, where I think is the important metric of change is the culture. I think when you are calling out and saying that, sexual violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, all of these things, they do fall under Title IX. They are gender discrimination. That starts a culture change. And I think you saw with all the activism that happened under the Obama administration in the Title IX field, it did change how people were thinking about Title IX.

I graduated college right before the Obama administration. We didn't know who the Title IX person was. And I don't think a single person on my campus would have pointed to the Title IX. final nine person as having anything to do with sexual harassment or sexual violence, right? The title nine person in our minds was someone who dealt with sports. So I do think that who's president and how people are thinking about the importance of the issue and why it needs to be addressed, I think that that does for some sort of framework shifting. Even if the only thing it does is empower students to feel like, okay, someone should care about this versus the moment we find ourselves in now where we have a president and an administration that is so hostile to women

and hostile to the idea of holding people accountable for sexual violence. And I think it's seen as being more permissive under the Trump administration. You're not even allowed now in grants to say things like women. And so I think people are more emboldened to not do the right thing under that cultural framework. Yeah. What a time to be alive. Fuck. Instead of guessing about what supplements you should take and what you should focus on, superpower can actually give you data to guide you. It's a membership where you get access to over 100 biomarkers through a simple lab test, either at home or nearby. And it gives you a much more complete picture of what's actually going on in your body. We're talking insights into things

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I think about this a lot. One of the biggest things is to strike this idea of neutrality in Title IX. neutrality is not found in Title IX policy. It's not part of the law, but this idea of neutrality is something that is pervasive in administrators' understanding of their roles and also the ways that universities speak about the Title IX role. I've even seen job postings for Title IX administrators saying, you must be a neutral party. But this idea of neutrality through my interviews and my discussions was the one thing I thought really messed up administrators implement. because that is where they got the idea that they had to be a support for all students. They had to have empathy for everyone and that they couldn't act because to actually say, no, this act of violence happened and even to acknowledge that they have emotions around that. Not that emotions should be used as evidence, but once you have evidence and you have understood, yes, an act of violence occurred, I mean, we're human, right? you should be allowed to be able to say,

it upsets me that someone was harmed. And like, how do we write this harm? Instead of feeling like, actually, I can't even acknowledge any emotion because that would make me bias. And so I have to pretend that this didn't happen or that it's not as bad as it is. And that just makes them biased

in the opposite direction. When you think about wrongdoing, when horrible things happen, when inequality, when violence, when terrible things occur, there is no neutrality in that. If you're going to be neutral, then you can't address it. So I think the idea of using neutrality is such a main focus of Title IX implementation, is to completely defying it and to go against what Title IX is there for, which is to address

discrimination. Nicole and I, with the work that we do with beyond compliance, there are such little things that universities and organizations can do to make their environments more responsive and able to address sexual violence. A lot of times in campus cultures, it's not just student-on-student sexual violence. There is a lot of faculty with student sexual violence, too, that I don't think we talk about enough. And I think right now, with all these Epstein files being released, something that I've been talking about with a lot of my colleagues and friends is there hasn't really been this reckoning of how many university faculty, university presidents took money, hung out with Epstein, even when you read some of the survivor testimony from Epstein's victims, how they were forced

to have sex with some of these professors. And right now, I think with these files being released and seeing the inner workings of how in cahoots people were with Epstein, it shows again how comfortable universities can be with perpetrators. There's so much trauma fatigue, I feel like, too. Do you see that influence your work or influence attitudes, I should say? Yes. And I think that this is the complexity part of it. I think we as people sometimes say, oh, it's so complicated, we can't do anything about this. And really, when it comes down to it, it's pretty straightforward. It's like if you assault somebody, you should be held accountable for that. It's just wrong. But I do think people are so fatigued by just thinking about it. It's such a taboo issue. People don't want to think about it.

And I think we are conditioned to feel a lot of sympathy and empathy for Matt. I have been doing this work for almost two decades. I even find myself sometimes when I hear something automatically feeling bad for a perpetrator. And I have to take a step back and say, oh my goodness, look at this cultural conditioning that I've also been a part of. It's hard for people. I I think people do feel fatigued. I think people don't like to think that this happens so often. I don't think people like to feel that they're complicit. But I also don't feel like they like to feel that they can do something about it. It's easier for everyone to be neutral. One of my favorite writings is by Judith Herman. And she talks about with perpetrators and victims. And she says, the perpetrator does

not ask for much. They ask for you to see and speak and hear no evil. The perpetrator actually asked for your silence. It's easy sometimes in that way to be silent. But a victim asked for engagement. A victim asks, see me, say that it's not okay. And that's much harder, especially when the world is falling around us or when we don't feel in control, it's much easier sometimes to be silent than to have to engage and have to bear witness and to say, no, this is wrong. So true. And I'm curious, I talked to both Dr. Bedera and Dr. Holland a bit about this, both on and off interview. But speaking of trauma exhaustion, how do you remain hopeful while doing this work, which can feel really overwhelming?

For me as a researcher, and I think people in this field, it is, different than researching other subjects. For me, not completely endlessly having this be the only thing that's going on in my life kind of helps me have a little bit more balance. At least for me, when I'm in it and in it and in it, it can get really bleak. And I'm like, God, is anything ever going to change? This is just hopeless. But then I remember that is the orchestrated complexity of it. Like that feeling that is manufactured to keep us in this position where nothing ever changes. And so I guess my hope is that by being able to address the mechanisms for why inequality happens by saying this is actually on the ground what's going on, this is why well-intentioned

people are not doing the right thing, not to point fingers and to make people out to be villains, but to replace judgment with curiosity and say what is actually happening. And then to be able to say, okay, now I understand what is going on, the mechanisms, the processes, how people are thinking about these issues. That gives me hope because that opens up an avenue to be creative, to problem solve, to think about how do we make this better. And that, for me, is the fun in linking up with Dr. Badera and working with Beyond Compliance. people come to us with different issues and then we're able to say, using not many resources,

how can we reframe this or retrain people or think about this policy slightly differently in ways that don't support people falling into trauma fatigue or people automatically orchestrating complexity or people not being able to see the impact that they're having? So that all gives me a lot of hope in this field. Also, survivors are surviving. There's so many people who are thriving and using the awful things that they've had to go through in ways to make it better for everyone. And so for me, being part of survivor spaces and seeing survivor work, looking at these next generations, I just think looking at things like how my cohort of college students didn't even know about this thing, Title IX, really.

And now, at least when you're talking to students that they could talk about having some idea that they have rights in this, that to me gives me hope because it means it might take a little bit, but the trajectory is going, I think, in the right way. Or at least that's what I hope. My naive hopes, maybe. Speaking of the next generation, what do you want students who are listening to understand about Title IX? Well, I want students to understand that it's a work in progress. us. It's hard for me to speak to this because on one instance, I think that there are things that students can get from their universities. I think that there are certain accommodations. I think that there are things that the university can do for students when they unfortunately

have to deal with the horrible experience of being violated. And so I don't want to say that universities cannot provide anything. I think that there are things that they can provide. but I do not think that universities yet are places where students find a lot of justice and or healing. I don't think that universities yet are places where they can find accountability. What I want students to know is that there are people out there who understand and care. There are places to go to get support. I would not put all your eggs in the university basket or your trust in your university being able to really do this well. because most are not doing it great.

And I would want students to know that they actually can fan together and demand more. Related to the nuance of racism intersecting with gender discrimination, does it feel like in your experience, administrators are aware of the extra challenges that students of color or students coming from marginalized communities face when reporting? Yeah, so this is a great question. And actually, when I went into my research, I was thinking,

this is gender discrimination. So like race and class, of course, they're going to come up. They did not, actually. Really, only one administrator I spoke to, spoke about race. And really, she just was very fixated on the idea of how difficult it could be for a student of color to report an incidence of sexual violence to her since she was a white woman. The administrators I spoke to two or three of them were people of color, and race and class did not really come up. And I think part of that goes back to my theory of the process of orchestrated complexity is when you're trying to make it more complicated or when you're unconsciously trying not to really deal with it,

a lot of the ways that administrators were handling these incidences of sexual violence was to flatten them. It was a surprising finding that it really just was not something that seemed to be on anybody's mind. And even when I would ask quite directly about race and class, it was very much brushed off. That speaks to the broader issue. Yeah, it feels like when I think about all of the overarching issues that we discuss on the podcast when it comes to institutional betrayal, systemic failures, so much of it boils down to patriarchy. and white supremacy. Yes.

The other thing, I've talked a lot about cultures and think about the culture, what an ideal victim looks like when we talk about this media scrutiny too as well. What were the big cases that were in newspapers and make it to that level? When you talk about internalized misogyny, it's really interesting because some of these administrators

spoke about how feminist they were and how much they cared about these issues and other things like gender inequality, but then they would act in ways where like, yeah, there's so much internalized misogyny or where they would deliberately use rape mythology and all of these things that they said that they stood against to create this complexity around their cases

so that they could sleep at night and not feel bad about this role. Thank you so much for being willing to come share so much knowledge and expertise with us and for the important work and research. that you're doing, where can folks follow and support you? I publish under my full name Jacqueline Cruz. You could go to our website, beyondcompliance consulting.com.

Who does Beyond Compliance Serve? We work with a bunch of different organizations. So we have worked with different universities. We've worked with different university departments. We've worked a little bit in the tech sector. we've worked with giving expert testimony and law cases. Really basically any organization that comes to us with a problem and, as our name, suggests, we are not just about compliance. There are organizations that do just compliance. And for Nicole and I, the bare minimum is compliance. What we're really looking at is also cultural change. How do we change the framework of how people think about sexual violence? How do we encourage accountability. How do we center survivor supportive practices for organizations who are interested in that? That is who we work with. I think especially in this environment where people and

organizations are so resource constrained, one of the things Nicole and I love doing is just finding creative solutions to work with what organizations have already. I think that that is one of our biggest findings is that some of these things that even we've talked about, they're not so resource dependent. There are just tweaks that we can make in policies and procedures to acknowledge some of these frame shifts that don't take a lot of money or resources, but can change mindsets and thinking about how administrators or practitioners do their jobs. Wonderful. Thank you again so, so much for being willing to speak with me. Oh, thank you also for the work that you're doing, putting more ears to this issue and speaking

with everyone. And there's just so many amazing colleagues that I have who do this work. And sometimes it is more marginalized work. And so I think the recognition of this issue and speaking to people who have real expert knowledge on it, it's so important. So thank you so much for doing that. An honor. Thank you so much to each and every survivor and guest for sharing their experiences with us.

and thank you for listening. Something Was Wrong is a broken cycle media production created and executively produced by Tiffany Reese. Thank you endlessly to our team. Associate producer, Amy B. Chesler, social media marketing manager Lauren Barkman, graphic artist Sarah Stewart, and audio engineers Becca High and Stephen Wack.

Marissa and Travis at WME, audio boom, and our legal and security partners. Thank you so much to the incredibly talented Abiyomi Lewis for this season's gorgeous cover of Gladrag's original song, You Think You, from their album, Wonder Under. Thank you to music producer Janice J.P. Pacheco for their work on this cover recorded at the Grill Studios in Emoryville, California. Find all artist's socials linked in the episode notes to support and hear more. If you'd like to share your story with us, please head, to Something Was Wrong.com. If you would like to help support the show,

you can subscribe and listen ad-free on Apple Podcasts, purchase a sticker from our sticker shop at brokencyclemedia.com, share the podcast with a loved one, or leave us a review. Want to stay up to date with us? Follow us on Instagram and TikTok at Something Was Wrong podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe, friends. Thank you.