Something Was Wrong - S25 Ep4: Institutional Betrayal: How Title IX Fails Survivors with Dr. Nicole Bedera

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

*Content Warning: institutional betrayal, sexual violence, stalking, on-campus violence, intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, stalking, rape, and sexual assault.Free + Confidential Resources + Safety Tips: somethingwaswrong.com/resources   Follow Dr. Nicole Bedera: Website: https://www.nicolebedera.com/  Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/nbedera.bsky.social  Book: On The Wrong Side - How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence: https://www.nicolebedera.com/about-1  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:Bedera, N. (2021). Beyond Trigger Warnings: A Survivor-Centered Approach to Teaching on Sexual Violence and Avoiding Institutional Betrayal. Teaching Sociology, 49(3), 267-277. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055X211022471  Bedera, Nicole (2022). "The illusion of choice: Organizational dependency and the neutralization of university sexual assault complaints." Law & Policy 44(3): 208-229. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/items/4ded7343-efe3-499f-a61a-3a1bf03258e3Bedera, Nicole. 2024. “I Can Protect His Future, but She Can’t Be Helped: Himpathy and Hysteria in Administrator Rationalizations of Institutional Betrayal.” The Journal of Higher Education 95 (1): 30–53. doi:10.1080/00221546.2023.2195771. Bedera, Nicole et al. “"I Could Never Tell My Parents": Barriers to Queer Women's College Sexual Assault Disclosure to Family Members.” Violence against women vol. 29,5 (2023): 800-816. doi:10.1177/10778012221101920 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35938472/ Bedera, Nicole Krystine. On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence. University of California Press, 2024. https://www.nicolebedera.com/about-1 Cipriano, A. E., Holland, K. J., Bedera, N., Eagan, S. R., & Diede, A. S. (2022). Severe and pervasive? Consequences of sexual harassment for graduate students and their Title IX report outcomes. Feminist Criminology, 17(3), 343–367. https://doi.org/10.1177/15570851211062579 Grassi, Margherita, and Eleonora Volta. “Controlling the Narrative: The Epistemology of Himpathy in Sexual a...” Phenomenology and Mind, Rosenberg & Sellier, 1 Dec. 2024, journals.openedition.org/phenomenology/4128

Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences and discusses topics that may be upsetting. This season discusses sexual, physical, and psychological violence. Please consume the following episodes with care. For a full content warning, sources, and resources for each individual episode, please visit the episode notes. Opinions shared by the guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Broken Cycle Media. The podcast in any linked materials should not be misconstrued as a substitution for legal or medical advice. Thank you so much for listening. You think you know me, you don't know me well at all.

You don't know anybody till you talk to someone. I am so excited to be speaking with Dr. Bedera today, who received her PhD from the University of Michigan. She's the co-founder of the consulting practice beyond compliance, which works on anti-violence initiatives and supports organizations' efforts to respond to and prevent sexual violence. Over the last decade, she has researched sexual violence across various contexts, including college campuses and LGBTQ-plus communities. exploring how institutional policies, cultural norms, and organizational practices shape patterns of abuse and institutional betrayal. Her research has been featured in major media outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, Time Magazine, Slate, and Teen Vogue.

Dr. Baderra, I'm honored to be speaking with you today and especially to discuss your book on the wrong side, how universities protect perpetrators and betray survivors of sexual violence. Thank you so much for speaking with me. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. What's it like to be in the New York Times? The first time I was in the New York Times, it was because I wrote an opinion piece about campus sexual violence. And it was in this moment, if you think about the recent history of Title IX, we have the Obama administration who comes in and basically says, we're going to enforce Title IX for really some of the first times ever in a really big way. There'd been all of these laws and regulations on the books that universities had been ignoring, and Obama

said we're going to do something about it. And so there was all of this renewed effort and excitement around Title IX. And then Trump took office. And one of Trump's big campaign promises was to reverse all of that and to say, we're going to go back to the way things were before or worse, where Title IX either will not be enforced or it will be used to punish survivors. That was the moment when I wrote my opinion piece for the New York Times was after the Trump administration had taken power and they put out their draft of how they wanted to change the way sexual assault was handled on campus. It was a wild experience for so many reasons, including that at the time, I was still a graduate student. I was in my second year at the University of Michigan. I'd had my master's at that

point. So I wasn't super, super fresh into grad school and research, but I think a lot of people thought I was too fresh to be able to talk about these types of things. And so that played a role. A lot of people who just thought stepped to the side, you don't have a right to talk about this, which I thought was interesting, given that students are some of the primary victims of sexual violence on a college campus in some ways you'd think that would make me more credible. But I really saw the gamut of responses. I saw people who were worried about what was happening, who cared about it very much. It was a very widely shared piece. That was one of my first forays into the type of harassment and hostility towards anybody who speaks about this too publicly and speaks about sexual violence

too publicly. I got a series of emails from a sociology professor of all people who really wanted me to use my platform to defend perpetrators. Writing in the New York Times, it was sort of the first time I started hearing from perpetrators via email regularly, which has been a feature of my work ever since. I'm sure there were a lot of supportive emails too, but what I remember is the perpetrator emails, the harassment, and all of it feeling a bit eerie in reference. In retrospect, seeing about how many Title IX rights we have lost since 2018. Before becoming a researcher, you mentioned in your book that you were a victim advocate. Did that early work of yours inspire you to get into this kind of research?

Yeah, it absolutely did. I started my work as a victim advocate at the same time that I got my first research grant to study campus sexual violence. At the time, I was thinking, okay, I know this is an issue I want to do something about. But I don't know on which end. Am I going to be a practitioner or am I going to be a researcher? And I actually preferred being a victim advocate. I liked that job a lot more than I enjoy research, which I think is part of why I'm now consulting as opposed to working as a professor.

But I ended up deciding to go to graduate school and become a researcher because it became so obvious to me that the system is so fundamentally oppressive, which is different than broken. I think that the system is operating exactly as designed and it's not. meant to oppress victims of violence, to strip them of their social status, and to retramatize them if they dare to say that the violence they experienced is wrong. I was working as a hospital advocate, so I was seeing survivors sometimes mere hours after their sexual assaults. And I was really struck by the way the system from its very onset was difficult, painful, re-traumatizing,

sometimes hostile, survivors would internalize that almost immediately. The questions I would get from survivors in that role were things like, why did this happen to me? Why is it my fault? Why is everybody treating me this way now? And I could see them really grappling with not just the violence they experienced, but the way the system as a whole was no longer treating them like someone who deserve protection. And instead they were being treated with suspicion and doubt. I decided to go to graduate school and become a researcher to answer some of those questions in a better way, in part, because when I looked up the answers in the academic literature for myself, I didn't like a lot of what I found. Now I've come to realize that if you dig a little farther, you can find feminist

anti-violence researchers who've been doing this work for decades, who've been finding the same types of things that I found. I became a researcher because I wanted a better, more accurate answer to those questions. The things I saw as a victim advocate really deeply shaped the way I saw my research, when you've spent time with hundreds, we're probably getting close to thousands of survivors that I spent time with and talked to about their experiences and their stories, either as a practitioner, as a researcher, or just as a person who people know will talk about this stuff. I hear it from people in my personal life all the time too. You realize that no matter how different the survivors are from each other, the way they're treated by the system is

the same. And I think that insight has shaped my research more than anything else. I'm curious how you got the access from Western University, where I believe you spent a year or more conducting research and interviewing survivors for your book. I think I got really lucky in retrospect. When I wanted to do this project, I was told by everybody at the university I was attending, you basically have a year to try to get access to a Title IX office. You're going to fail, and then you need to find a new dissertation. It's sort of the sentiment that I was hearing. It was very clear that I would never be allowed to do this research at the University of Michigan, that the idea of criticizing the institution granting your degree,

there was really no way they would grant you that degree if you're going to be that critical, which is telling on its own about the way all of this operates. The way I got into Western University came from my years as a victim advocate. It's a difficult job and it pays very poorly. And so a lot of the people who I'd known from when I was a victim advocate had also gone to graduate school and had also tried to find other ways to serve and support survivors

where they'd also be able to pay for their rent. I reached out to the advocates that I knew all around the country and said, are any of you working at universities? Do you think any of your universities would be willing to have a researcher come and observe what you're doing? And one of them said, yes. I still think I had to get really lucky because I went to a few different institutions

to find the one where I could do the fieldwork. What would usually happen is the first person I would talk to would say, absolutely, we would love to have a researcher. Let's go get everybody else involved who needs to say yes to this. And then it was usually someone in Title IX or general counsel that would ultimately say no. And I think the reason that didn't happen at Western University was because the Title IX coordinator was very freshly hired. And in the past, she'd been a political appointee for places like state governments, federal governments, where oversight and transparency, it's just a part of it. People who've worked in those roles are so used to having researchers looking at everything you're doing and all of your documents are public documents that anybody can ask to see at any time that the press can look.

out at any time. And so she just didn't think twice about it. What's sort of funny is that Western University is a public university. And so all of that degree of transparency and openness that she'd been accustomed to in other government agencies on paper, you should get from a public university too. But it breaks a lot of norms. And I think that's part of why I heard no from so many other institutions. I will say that it took a long time to get through the institutional review board process. So it's the ethics board on a college campus that looks over studies to make sure that they are ethical for participants, but also that they're of low legal risk for the university. By the time I made it to start my field work, which was about a year later, I do think the

Title IX coordinator at Western University was starting to have some second thoughts and to realize how many norms she had violated. But nobody ever told me to leave. So I stayed. But as the research went on, there were more and more meetings that I think I would have been invited to in September that I was not invited to by May. You discuss in your book dismantling the idea of a quote, good school and how institutions often give off a vibe or in their advertising that they are progressive or they're safe. I've seen this reflected in a lot of the interviews with the survivors I've spoken to that the expectation that they had or that their parents had when sending them to college was that they were going to be safe, but at minimum they were going to be taken care of if

something bad happened. And sadly, none of them feel that they were this good school persona. How does that impact the understanding that people have entering into an institution? I think schools are one of our most beloved social institutions, that even people who had a complicated relationship with the school they attended or some of the educators. It's so much of your life when you are young that it's hard for you to get all the way through your education without being a little grateful that it introduced you to your best friend, to a mentor who you loved. It's the places where most of us learn to read and write and connect with others in the world. To be able to do all of that learning in a school, you do have to trust it.

on some level or at least be dependent on it to the point that you can't really imagine what your life would be like without it. I think that the way we rely on schools, not just to educate us as people, but also educate all of broader society that lets us know things like if our food is safe, you know, if they're new medical advancements, all of these different things. We look to schools to bring us that expertise. And I think that's part of why it's so shocking and upsetting when those schools become sources of violence and discrimination. Because, ironically, the very people who are experts on those things, like me, when I conducted this project, I was working for a university as a doctoral student.

That was who was paying my salary. Universities can leverage those experts, leverage that legitimacy, leverage our good experiences with them to convince us that they're safe when they're not. It's a relatively low lift for the institution. But they do still put a lot of effort into convincing us that they're safe. And I'm thinking of this research by a sociologist named Laurel Aedleman, who was interested originally in why there's so much race discrimination on college campuses, even though it's illegal in the same way that sex discrimination is illegal under Title IX. And what she found is that schools engage in something called symbolic compliance, which is where they put a lot of effort into convincing the general public, government regulators, anyone who's providing oversight over the institute. they put a lot of effort into convincing us that they are compliant with civil rights law,

whether that's around race, sex, gender, sexuality, disability status, immigration status, whatever it might be. But that researchers have found that that's all it ever was, was symbols. And that's part of why it's so jarring when you go to report. This is a school that has told me over and over again that this is a safe place. They've put together this entire system. They've told us that they hired all these staff and we do these prevention trainings and all these things have happened.

And then ultimately it's toothless. And once you get inside of it, you realize the system isn't even functional. It can be a little easier to see it in a historical example to start. But it's the rape whistle. The universities, if you go back a few decades, they were handing out rape whistles at orientation, telling students, we would want to know if someone's trying to attack you. That's sort of the idea of a whistle is that it alerts people around you to what's going on with the assumption they would intervene.

But rape whistles aren't a particularly useful intervention. assume that the perpetrator isn't a stranger, that violence only happens when you're walking around at night, carrying your keys or your whistle, that it would never happen somewhere like your bedroom while you were asleep. So there's a big misunderstanding of what violence is in that space. Even this idea that if you blew the whistle, that university administrators and professors and all these other people on campus would be running to help you isn't really what they're trained to do. There's a reason why universities stopped giving them out. And the same thing is happening on college campuses today.

When you're in your first moment of student orientation, one of the first things that will happen at most schools now is that they will train you about consent. They will tell you about sexual assault. They will tell you that they want you to report sexual violence if it happens to you or someone you know. But we're still running into the same issue with the rape whistle, which is that when you show up to report, there's no one at the school who has been trained in how to really help you. If anything, they might have been trained about how to silence.

you would get you to stop trying to come forward. And that's why it's such a jarring sense of betrayal, because there haven't all these symbols trying to convince us that it's safe. And it's just, it's not safe. Something you wrote about was early patterns that signal a campus is likely to protect perpetrators. What indicators should families and students look out for? The tricky thing is that you'd be hard-pressed to find a university that's doing well. And I'm just going to say that from the outset.

But there are spaces on campus that are safer or riskier. Some of these things you can look out at the institution level, but a lot of them, it's more about where you're going to spend your time on a college campus. The characteristics of unsafe spaces are the ones that are male-dominated, competitive, and hierarchical, where there are power disparities between the people within them and that men are privileged above everyone else. I think the first organization that comes to mind is a fraternity or a first organization. football team, and those are really good examples of places where we know that the violence

perpetration rate is higher than other places on campus. But it's also going to be places that have what sociologists call a glass escalator effect. So these can be spaces where there are a lot of women present, but men dominate the top of the hierarchy. So places like theater departments, music departments, anywhere that you do have those three characteristics, that there's that competitive component, that there is a hierarchy, and that men are at the top of that hierarchy. One of the examples that I like to give is a marching band. Because if you think of a band, it tends to be one of the spaces on campus where there's actually a mix of people of different genders, one of the few that isn't really gender segregated. But if you look inside a band,

the instruments have gender stereotypes and gender segregation within the different sections of the band. It is competitive, where there's a first chair and a last chair. And there's a hierarchy. related to not just your musical ability, but also who might be considered to be a section leader, who might be the best one, who is advanced into different high status roles, that don't have anything to do with the music, but have everything to do with the organizations around the music,

who's favored by faculty, things like that, who gets a solo, even if they're not first-tier. It's those types of characteristics that sociologists have known for a long time are related to high rates of sexual violence perpetration. And those are the main things you want to look for when you're trying to think of, is this a place that's safe or not? Or if you are within an organization already, how can we make our organization safer? Really, you're asking how can we make it less competitive? How can we have fewer power disparities?

How can we make sure that women are treated evenly and fairly? How can we make sure that people who are gender marginalized, transgender and non-binary people are treated well too? And are treated in a way where they have equal access to power. Those are the types of things we have to be thinking about. The other framework that comes to mind in terms of places that are safer or unsafe is just whether or not they're engaging in institutional betrayal, which is the scholarly concept that finds that when institutions behave in certain ways and they take certain actions or inactions, they refuse to help, it can exacerbate a survivor's traumatic symptoms. And there's a list of all of these different things that cause institutional betrayal. Things like creating an environment where sexual violence feels normal and predictable, creating an environment. environment where it's difficult to report or where people who are reported are punished,

or creating an environment where if you experience violence, it's difficult for you to remain in that space and you don't feel valued by the institution. So that's another list of things I'm thinking at the institutional level. I don't think any amount of preparing in advance to think is the safer and unsafe place guarantees that it'll be a safe space. But it is the kind of thing that can let you know that things are starting to go awry. What misunderstandings about survivor behavior do universities often weaponize? I really can't emphasize the degree of ignorance that I heard from school administrators when I interviewed them about the reporting process and about survivors and what they expected. It was one of the first places I'd been in a long time

where I interviewed people who said things like I thought all rape would be a stranger jumping out of the bushes. I was surprised by how much came from people who knew each other. The other thing I found is that that sort of naivete around violence is one of the things that the schools selected for in hiring, that they preferred people who believed in rape myths, who had misunderstandings about what violence is and how it operates. They much preferred those candidates over people who were experts on sexual violence or had a lot of experience or empathy working with survivors. The other thing that I found was just something that this is not my concept. It comes from a philosopher named Kate Mann is this concept of empathy, that they had.

this excessive empathy for perpetrators that came at the expense of survivors. Some of the things that when the administrators were evaluating cases that they would look to, it wasn't that they didn't believe the survivors or that they thought the violence wasn't real. The main thing that administrators were reacting to was a distaste for holding perpetrators accountable. And it didn't matter who the survivor was or what they did. The language they would use is all very gendered. Part of the sacrifice of being a woman is letting it go when you're sexually assaulted to protect the future, the privileges, all of the social power for your perpetrator.

That I would say was the main misunderstanding about survivors that I would run into was this real sense around their use of empathy, that women were less important than men. And that because a woman had experienced violence, she now had less to contribute. Her life was already ruined, she was already broken, and there was no undoing that harm. Whereas the perpetrator was still fully intact. And so they would use language like one life has already ruined, why ruined two, to justify their unwillingness to step in. That, I would say, is the biggest misunderstanding I saw about sexual violence.

What we know is that healing from sexual assault is not only possible but very likely. Sexual violence is so common in our society that if it broke all of us, there wouldn't be women around to do so many things in our society. A lot of the trauma that we ascribe to the sexual assault comes from institutional betrayal. So if a survivor gets the support they need right away, if they can get access back to their autonomy, if they can feel respected and cared for and protected by their community, they can recover very quickly. A lot of that enduring trauma that continues comes from institutional betrayal.

It comes from going to ask for help and being told no. That meant that the administrators, when they were looking at the victims and saying it's too late to help them, but we can still help the perpetrator. What they were really failing to recognize was that they were the source of harm at this point, that the harm from the perpetrator was only one piece of what was making things difficult for the survivor. And I could see that so clearly, some of the survivors from the study stayed in touch after the study was over. And for quite a few of them, they ended up transferring away from Western University or they would sort of graduate by the skin of their teeth. If they weren't experiencing violence in those spaces, they

tended to thrive. They tended to be great students with these fantastic futures ahead of them. And that was something that the school administrators just couldn't even picture for them. I can't even put into words what a failing that felt like on their end as educators working for an institution of education is to look at students in front of you and to say, well, we only believe in one of you. And so that's the one we're going to protect. One of the things that I felt that I learned from watching the administrators and observing them for a year and interviewing them was that they weren't thinking about victims much at all. And they were just thinking about what would make life as easy as possible for the perpetrator. The way your average person thinks about violence is just

really different than the way the people who are handling these cases instead of schools have been taught to think about violence. They don't think about victims, the way that the rest of us would start by thinking about victims. In your book, you reference how universities create illusionary pathways that look supportive but are structurally doomed to fail. Can you talk about what that looks like in practice. We were talking about symbolic compliance before, and we were talking about how universities try to convince us that they are safe when they are not. One of the things that they do is create all of these different systems that they claim will help if you go to them. But then if you go to them, they actually won't help you. The way I've been thinking about it

recently is like a maze. And the maze has a lot of dead ends. And the university is claiming credit for every time there's a different direction you can take in the maze. But if you're trying to get to the end of the maze, there was often only one way to get all the way through, and all of those other ways were distractions that were frustrating, that were exhausting. And that is the way the Title IX system is set up. There are all of these different options a survivor can take, but it would take an expert, and there are very few, to sit down with a survivor and say, for the outcome you want, you have to take a left here or right here, then another right, then another left. And if you turn any other way, it's not going to work out. So to give you an example, if you were trying to report a sexual assault

to your university, I always hesitate to say that this will happen in every single case, but for most universities, reports don't do anything at all. Once they receive a report that a sexual assault has happened, they have discretion about whether or not to start moving it through the Title IX system. But for the most part, they treat the report as the end of the path. For the book, I interviewed all of these survivors who reported to Title IX and then they were just waiting and waiting and waiting to hopefully hear back. They were checking their emails with so much anxiety for months. Every time they heard a notification on their phone, they would be worried that it was Title IX. They would describe this moment of temporary relief that it wasn't. And then the frustration and

more worries setting in to say, oh, this is not anywhere near over yet. And then eventually they give up when they didn't hear anything. Instead, if you wanted Title IX to do something about what you told them had happened, you had to file a different form called a complaint. And the complaint in the report forms are essentially identical. On Western University's website, the top of the report form actually said file a complaint. You know, you can't really begrudge anybody who would struggle to figure out where you should go because I, as an expert on Title IX, doing this research for a year, it took me six months to figure out where the correct form was online for a complaint. The preferable way that you would file a complaint is that you would go in person to not the

victim advocacy office because they wouldn't have the capacity to tell these things apart. Actually, a victim advocate asked me when I was asking about the difference between reports and complaints, she said, I don't know would you mind telling me when you find out as just a testament to how dysfunctional the system is. But ideally, you would go to someone in the Title IX office. you would tell them what happened to you, and then they would decide at their, again, their discretion, whether or not to offer you a complaint form. If you pick option A, that means that everything is over and the school will do nothing. If you pick option B, it might move forward. If someone else thinks it's a

good idea. And then if you pick option C, they're going to push around a bunch of paperwork for a while and it ultimately will still end somewhere or another. And the way that administrators would justify this, they thought it was a very good system. And I think that's something people need to understand. It's not that the system is broken and everybody knows it's broken. What they said was that it gave survivors more choices and that they would be able to choose what they wanted that they could choose to end the Title IX process at any time. But it's only a choice if you know what the stakes are

of the decisions you're making. If you're really just poking around in the dark until you happen to find the right thing, you're not making a choice. What I found is that just this first hurdle we talked about between filing a report versus a complaint knocked out 80% of reports made to the Title IX office. There was a public report from the University of Michigan

from 2017 or 2018, where they go through the trajectory of every report they received to the Title IX office, and how many of them by the end turned into investigations that had some kind of an outcome, how many ended in a sanction? All of those things are listed. If you live in the states of New York or Maryland, or you're just curious about those states, it's publicly required that school share this information online. It's something you can look up. And what you'll see is that at all of these junctures, there are just huge amounts of survivors falling off. And so similar to what I saw, only about 20% of these cases make it past that complaint threshold.

And then at the University of Michigan, by the end of the year, they only had four cases that year that ended in any kind of a sanction that would discipline the perpetrator in any way. None of those sanctions were expulsions. They were mostly things like probation, which was really to go through this whole process to just receive a warning. It's such a long process for survivors. It turns reporting to the Title IX office into a war of attrition. You spend months or years trying to get from one end to the other, and you ultimately don't have the power to get that outcome you want anyway. It's still up to the discretion of the school.

Absolutely. And something that seems equally confusing that's come up for survivors and the interviews that we've conducted is the survivor understanding the difference between an informal report versus a formal complaint. Is that common in your experience for survivors to not necessarily understand the structure of how the reporting process flows and how that can impact the outcome? I'm just going to be really honest with you. There is nobody who can tell you what an informal process is.

There is not an expert who can tell you definitively what it is because it is intended to be ambiguous to give the university ultimate discretion in what they want to do. A little bit of history is helpful here. So if we go back to the Obama era of Title IX, one of the things that was required by the Department of Education was that universities could not handle sexual violence, including some component of penetration, so anything involving a rape,

that they couldn't use any kind of informal process. The reason it was prohibited was because when universities are permitted to do this informally, they tend to do nothing. They tend to shuffle around a bunch of papers, waste the survivor's time, often make a lot of victim blaming, minimizing or controlling comments along the way that hurt the survivor more. And then ultimately they do nothing to the perpetrator. And that's the way things were operating when schools had complete discretion over how they wanted to handle things informally. Today, under the Trump administration's regulation, the only thing that's written in the regulation about what an informal resolution is, is.

is that it has to be voluntary by all parties, which means that even the perpetrator can drop out at any time, and then it's over. And it can't be punitive. The definition of punitive is something we can quibble over quite a lot. If I were defining what punitive would be, it would be something like expulsion. It would be something that's a formal disciplinary proceeding, as defined by the university.

But the way that a lot of schools are defining punitive is an inconsistent. convenience. For example, one of the things that was considered punitive and could not be done through an informal resolution at Western University was setting a schedule of times when the victim and perpetrator would be able to go to the library without seeing each other. I'll use a real example from the book. There was a survivor that were in the same music class. They had to access specific musical scores in the library as part of their education. And one of the things that was happening to the survivor was that the perpetrator was that the perpetrator, kept taking the time slots right around when she would be there so that he had an excuse to intimidate her and to threaten her and stalk her on campus. One of the things she looked for from her university was to say, we need a buffer where either I'm going to go really early and he's going to go really late or I'm going to go really late and he's going to go really early. And that's something that the school said was too punitive for the perpetrator. So what it's turned into is a lot of fuzziness. If your school says that they're going to,

conduct an informal resolution around your sexual violence case, you have no idea what's even on the table for you. At least at Western University, what that usually meant was that the school shuffled around a lot of paperwork before doing nothing, which is exactly what they were doing before the Obama administration stepped in and tried to curb the practice. When I'm thinking about the informal resolutions that I heard about in my research for the book, the one with the most teeth was a voluntary training where someone from the Title IX office had a PowerPoint where they read the definitions of sexual violence and sexual harassment to a workplace. And because it was a voluntary training, it was overwhelmingly attended by the survivor and her friends and colleagues. I only heard

of one training like that that a perpetrator attended and the survivor said that he was on his email the whole time. He wasn't paying attention. He was making little snotty comments. So these are not effective educational remedies. It's a hard truth people don't want to hear. We don't have an effective educational remedy to change perpetrator's behavior. And so a lot of schools are promising that, but when they're following their own internal rules, which are not shared with the rest of us, what we find is that they end up really doing nothing versus a formal investigation is what you think of when you report a sexual

assault where somebody's going to ask you what happens. They'll take a witness statement. they'll ask you if there's anybody else who can verify your claims, anybody else who can provide evidence of what took place. They'll do the same with the perpetrator. And then at the end of it, they'll decide whether or not they have enough evidence that the violence happened. And if they do, then they're supposed to discipline the perpetrator. So these are completely different pathways. Ultimately, the thing I would say to a survivor is that if you want any kind of an outcome that will keep them at a physical distance from you, your only real option is a formal investigation. And it still

might not work. If you want your perpetrator's behavior to change in any way, you have no option except a formal investigation because the restrictions around informal resolution are so significant that you can't meaningfully involve a perpetrator. If the thing you want does not involve a perpetrator at all, there is a very small chance you can do it informally. If you wanted something like like a training about the available resources for faculty in your department because you don't like the way they reacted to you when you said you were sexually assaulted. That's something that maybe your school might be able to do with informal resolution. But it's such a complicated system. The issue is that every school does it so differently. For anybody who works at a school

who might be listening to this, one of the things I would say that every school should do and something that I think survivor activists should ask for that parents should ask for is the list of available remedies for an informal resolution should be written out. One of the things you talk about is fragmenting violence. Can you explain that to the listeners? I developed a concept of fragmenting violence to describe this thing that Title IX staff would do. It's when they would receive multiple concerns about a single perpetrator. And sometimes that would come from one victim who had been hurt so many different ways by one

perpetrator. And sometimes it would come from many victims who had been hurt by the same serial perpetrator. But the Title IX office, what they would do instead of thinking about all these cases together or as a collective, which we see more commonly in the criminal and civil justice systems, is they would separate them all off individually and say that any evidence given to one case probably couldn't be used in another case. If you were to hear this story or if you were to look at it in a newspaper and you hear the story of a serial perpetrator who's hurt so many different victims, so many different ways, we all look at it and say, how could anyone possibly let this go on? If they know this is happening, how could they look the other way when there's so much violence from so many different directions? But what the university would do was say, well, we're only going to look at one piece at a time. And do we have enough evidence to do something about this one individual piece? Yes or no.

And so they would fragment the violence into these little tiny, easily dismissable pieces, which led to these huge benefits for some of the most prolific perpetrators. on a college campus. I'm curious, what are some of the systemic and cultural reasons why schools tend to protect the accused versus the survivors when it comes to sexual violence? Well, the first thing I want to say is that it's gendered and that one of the things I founded my research and the others find as well is that when the role of what they would call complainant and respondent or accused an accuser are reversed and the person making the accusation is a man and the person being accused is a woman, in, the school tends to then side with the accuser. They tend to side with the man, no matter what part of the process he's in.

And so I think that's a really important thing to recognize that the problem there isn't that they don't know what to do. The problem there is that they're protecting patriarchy. I think it's worth adding a little caveat on that. In the cases that involve a complainant who is a man and a respondent who is a woman, most of the time what we're looking at is something called a retaliatory cross-complaint, which is when a perpetrator abuses the Title IX office to try to control their victim. And the most common way that that happens is the victim files a complaint and the perpetrator

files this retaliatory cross complaint to make it look like, oh, haven't we both done bad things, or I'll drop my complaint if you drop yours, and to try to confuse investigators into thinking that they don't know who the true victim is. And in those cases, the school tends to still side with the man, even though they're in the complainant role. one of the things I expected to find and that I'd been told by so many people, administrators, other researchers, I'd been told to expect that universities wanted to help survivors, but their hands were tied because perpetrators had so many more legal rights. And it just is not true.

Quite the opposite is true. What people are really saying when they say that is that we have accepted that universities violate people's civil rights. And so we don't hold them accountable. and so we act as if survivors have no rights, but survivors do have rights, women do have rights. What I saw instead was that the university was willing to take on a huge amount of legal risk to protect perpetrators because they considered them to be valuable members of the institution. You're probably thinking of the star football player or a really famous professor or the child of a donor.

And yes, all of those people are some of the people who are protected. But one of the things that we find is that universities use gender as a proxy for power. They are not interested in building a system that protects only the most wealthy, powerful, favorite men on campus. Because if they make a mistake and they penalize one of those men, that could hurt the institution. If universities were just protecting the powerful, there were survivors I interviewed who should have been protected. they were also the children of donors or the children of famous professors. And it wasn't enough for the university to step in because gender is the only proxy they use. That's part of why my answer is so simple.

It's just about gender because every time I look to any other variable that should have been explanatory, gender was the only thing that made sense. Did you find that certain stakeholder groups like faculty, staff, coaches, had patterns of complicity? I think that there were way fewer exceptions than I would have hoped. We would all hope that if something happened in a feminist class, or if it happened in a department that had a lot of women in positions of power, we would hope that that would change things. But it didn't for a lot of reasons. One of the things that I learned in my bones through this project, and I said to the students

who worked on this project a lot, was that we all think rape is wrong until we know the perpetrator. And I was pretty stunned by how quickly, essentially everyone within the institution would take the perpetrator's side when it was somebody who they knew. Even if they also knew the victim,

even if they were closer to the victim, there was this presumption that the perpetrator deserved more than the victim got. There are a lot of other. people who have written about this phenomenon. One of the ones that again comes to mind to me, someone I mentioned before, Kate Mann talking about empathy, because that's really what was happening. You would hope that there would be some faculty who have a strong enough commitment

to feminism, to gender egalitarianism, to nonviolence, than when it was right in front of them, they would immediately do what they could to support the survivor to make sure they could finish their education, to make sure they were safe. And instead, really everyone was responding by saying, we need to take a minute, let's hear the other side of the story, I don't want to hurt that other person. We've really internalized as a society, this idea that holding someone accountable for sexual assault is hurting them, which I think we've believed that for a long time before Trump took office and changed the way we thought about Title IX so fundamentally. Most people on campus would at least think that was immoral, even if you were.

if they would participate in it. And one of the things I saw in the field and that I've seen continue since then is this sort of full-throated acceptance of the idea that a perpetrator can be hurt through a survivor coming forward. I was the most disheartened by certain people who I hoped would do better, and then they didn't.

There were a few people on campus who didn't contribute to the pain, but they lacked the power to stop it as well. I'm thinking about people like victim advocates or there were some feminist faculty who would do really simple things. Like if there was a survivor in their classes and they were struggling under the trauma of all this and it was affecting their academics, they would work with them to find a way that they could still make the most out of their education, that they could learn something, and that it wouldn't

negatively impact their grades. It is possible and there are people who are doing it. And so that's something I want to be really clear about. There were these safe havens on campus of certain people who the perpetrators would know, would not help them. Those people would help survivors in whatever capacity they could. But none of those people

worked in Title IX. Which procedural steps most commonly retromatized survivors? Part of why it's hard to answer the question of what's the most traumatic structural issue that's causing the most harm to survivors is that they all cause harm. I don't know that any of them are more or less traumatic

as much as some are more or less visible in the moment. So a lot of the things that cause survivors' trauma are inactions. I gave the example earlier of filing a report and not realizing that your university won't do anything about a report. That's a low-grade trauma that's taking place every day

until the survivor realizes they're ignoring me. And when they realize, oh, they're ignoring me, they might be sitting looking at their email, they might be out talking to a friend. And so it feels more diffuse. But we don't see a huge amount of difference in terms of the amount of trauma

for survivors that are going through these processes based off of how far they got or what did they choose informal resolution versus an investigation? We see that it's all traumatic. But one of the things that makes cross-examination stand out and is so upsetting for survivors in the moment is you have a place to situate that trauma.

That it's such a predictable thing that would cause so much harm. And unlike all of these other types of institutional betrayals, coming face to face with your perpetrator or being cross-examined in a hostile manner can hit the survivor all at once to say, I cannot believe I'm in this position. I cannot believe that this is the way the system is set up.

And I'll agree that I think cross-examination it's a particular dagger to the heart because there is so much research that cross-examination is ineffective in sexual assault cases. It's ineffective if the thing you want is the truth. Because essentially what it does is it triggers survivors intentionally to make it difficult for them to speak fully and freely the way that they would if they were answering questions in a trauma-informed setting.

This is something that a lot of the general public doesn't know. There is no cross-examination requirement in the criminal justice system for sexual assault survivors. A lot of survivors choose to go on the stand or a prosecutor will say, I don't think the case is strong enough unless you take the stand. but there are sexual assault cases that work their way through the criminal justice system where the survivor never ever submits to cross-examination. This is something unique to educational institutions, but we see it most on college campuses. Cross-examination was banned under the Obama administration's approach.

And one of the reasons that it came back is because men's rights activists and their allies wanted to traumatize survivors and punish them for coming forward. One of the things that I heard from the perpetrators I interviewed is that they enjoyed the hearing process. They found it fun and entertaining because cross-examination allowed them to exert dominance over their victims and to humiliate them publicly. Universities very, very often ended up siding with the perpetrator. And so they got to humiliate the victims. They got to get this formal support on their side from this institution and feel so valid. It's another one of those moments where I feel like we're all worried about is the Title IX process too hard on perpetrators? And there's no evidence it's hard on them at all. It's built to cater to them in a really specific way. The other thing is that we are seeing this weird disparity where the survivor has to attend the hearing for disciplinary proceedings for a perpetrator who is not required to be there. This is written by design into the Trump administration's 2020 regulations.

I actually co-authored an article about it with Sage Carson, who was the director of No Year 9 at the time and Seth Galanter, who had worked for the Obama administration's Department of Education raising a red flag about this. But one of the things that was written into the Trump administration's regulation around cross-examination is that it is absolutely required. The victim does not have to attend in person, but they have to at least be there virtually. and if they don't attend, then none of the other statements they made through the Title IX process can be counted as evidence. There are a written statement about what happened, their interview with the Title IX officer.

All of these things disappear, down to text messages they sent to someone else saying they were sexually assaulted and asking for help. All of that is cleared out of the evidentiary record. And the same is true for perpetrators. So if a perpetrator doesn't attend all of the evidence that they have given to the Title IX officer, using their own words is cleared out of the evidentiary record, including things like confessions.

And one of the things that I think really surprises people and surprised me from my work for on the wrong side is perpetrators confess all the time. I would venture to say that perpetrators confess in most cases. And so the reason we're seeing survivors have to go through this cross-examination but perpetrators aren't showing up is because it gives perpetrators a massive advantage to skip their hearing. And it gives survivors a massive disadvantage to skip the hearing. Then it functions the exact way you're describing, which is that it feels like the victim is the one on trial, because in the eyes of the Trump administration and the eyes of the men's rights activists who they tapped on the shoulder to help write this regulation, that's what they want the Title IX process to be. That is exactly

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Did you have any cases at Western University that involves staff perpetuating violence onto students? Those cases were absolutely happening at Western University, and I heard about them on the periphery, but the staff was so good at making it difficult to report that I think a lot of those survivors did not enter the Title IX system. I had Western University's help in recruiting for the study. I recruited through the Victim Advocacy Office, the Dean of Students' Office, and the Title IX office. And what they were supposed to do was for any case involving a student, whether they were a victim, perpetrator, or students were in both roles. They were supposed to give them the recruitment form to participate in the study. But what I quickly realized was they were not recruiting

for cases involving faculty. It's one of the big missing holes in the book because the research that we have would suggest that the most common type of sexual harassment on a college campus, and as researchers, we use sexual harassment in the legal way. So that includes what the average person thinks of sexual harassment, but also all types of sexual violence, stalking, intimate partner violence, all of this other stuff too. So it's a glaring omission from the book. What I could get access to instead were cases involving students where faculty inserted themselves because they wanted to protect a certain student for whatever reason. So for example, one of the cases of the book, the perpetrator, he was a serial perpetrator, there were multiple Title IX cases against him.

He was the star student in this theatrical type program. You see a lot of sexual violence in theater programs because of some of those components we were talking about earlier. They are not necessarily male dominated, but men tend to be in positions of power and they're very hierarchical and competitive. For a theater department, the number of men they enrolled into their program can determine things like what shows they're going to be able to put on because the way that the professors in the department would describe it was that women were a dime a dozen, but men were diamonds in the rough. There was a case I heard about where when the star male student in this department was facing multiple Title IX cases, one professor in particular who was also known to sexually harassed students,

started submitting statements on support of the perpetrator, even though they had no knowledge of the violence at all. Obviously, that's such a deep institutional betrayal to the survivors. How do you go to class when your professor stepped into your Title IX case to say that they don't believe you? But on top of that, it's also the kind of evidence that shouldn't be admissible at all. In a lot of other types of crimes, character evidence is not considered to be admissible. It's considered irrelevant. Because just because you like somebody and they're a student, you think that you want that student to stay in your program as a professor, that has no bearing on whether or not they're a violent person.

And so the idea that this could be used as evidence to strengthen the perpetrator's side of the case is, mind boggling because what does the professor know? So I did see some cases like that. I saw certainly cases of workplace harassment and sexual harassment involving faculty in research labs and research settings. I usually was hearing more from staff than students in those scenarios. But I was sort of surprised in these cases because in my data, the way those cases were handled felt a little bit different. How does it affect survivors when professors or other faculty intervene in these cases? It's such a profoundly hurtful thing because what professors have access to is Survivor's education and their friends' education.

Often the hostility from faculty in these cases isn't just directed at the survivor. It's also all of the students that are taking the survivor's sides. I've gotten a window into this more in my consulting than I have in the book. But I think the reason that sexual violence is considered illegal under Title IX is not because it's a crime. It's because it's a form of sex discrimination and it negatively impacts survivors' educations. And because survivors are overwhelmingly gender marginalized when it comes to victims versus perpetrators, that means that the impact on women's education and the kinds of opportunities they can have access to on campus are different to the point of being discriminatory in comparison to your

average man's experience on a college campus. One of the places where we've seen that in the historical record is when faculty intervene in these Title IX cases to retaliate against victims, against people who are supporting them, especially if they're doing things like submitting evidence into a Title IX case. We do sometimes see faculty who use their power as an educator to deny victims' access to educational opportunities. In the example I'm talking about where we have this theatrical professor who is intervening in this case to support a specific male student perpetrator, that's the kind of thing that can affect casting decisions in future shows. It can affect whether or not the women on campus feel comfortable taking classes from that professor. It certainly affects things like whether or not they can feel like they can go to office hours or get a letter of recommendation. When we look at the legal history of Title IX, it's this dynamic. that actually led sexual violence to be classified

as a form of gender discrimination in the first place. The case was about sexual harassment happening at Yale University, Alexander v. Yale, 1980. The claimants in the case included not just the victims of sexual harassment, but they're friends because the faculty that were involved in these cases were giving such lower educational qualities to them.

Essentially, all women on campus, if they knew that there was the sexual harassment happening in places like office hours, they now felt like they had to avoid office hours in general. The power disparity is such that victims are going to have a hard time getting them removed from their position, getting a new professor hired right away, who will be able to give them educational opportunities. And so it derails an entire education, especially in these interpersonal dynamics. What changes do you feel could make Title IX more accessible and equitable? And what structural reforms are actually feasible in the near future.

Okay, so I have a few answers for this. One of the things I would say is that there is no quake and easy fix to the Title IX system if we're trying to keep it the way it is now. There isn't one thing that I would look at Title IX and wave a magic wand, and if I made that one change, it would fix everything. The entire system is designed to be dysfunctional and to punish survivors, to protect perpetrators. The entire system needs revision.

And Title IX, there are. really any good parts left. There had been some good parts in the past, but they are largely getting dismantled or defanged. Victim advocacy offices come to mind as a very good thing that came out of the Obama administration's approach to Title IX, that for a while was allowed to continue under the Trump administration, and now we're starting to see them close their doors, or they have much more limited capacity to help survivors on campus, or they're being reallocated. That's maybe the one thing I would want to try to preserve and strengthen on campus, is, the confidential victim advocacy programs

that some universities have put in place. But the rest of it, our work is almost easier when we can just say we can throw it all up. Let's completely start over. And if we were completely starting over, the thing that I would recommend is an independent system. Because ultimately, a lot of the problems with the Title IX process is that they are laden with conflicts of interest.

When a university is designing a system that will protect their favorite star professor or the football coach or whoever it is who they had in mind, When they wrote these policies, you're going to get a system that looks the way Title IX functions. Whereas if we had an independent entity that was designing their own system, it would probably look really different, a lot more survivor-centered. Everyone with expertise on the Title IX process works for the university.

But if you have an independent office who, by law, has to be made aware of any change made to the Title IX process, you now have an independent outsider who can help a survivor based off of what the survivor wants versus the way the institution hopes this case will go. That, I would say, is the most fundamental change that we need. I don't want to understate the harms of the criminal justice system, but something that was shocking to me and that I think everybody needs to know is that the Title IX system produces more institutional betrayal and fewer accountability actions than our criminal justice system, which isn't a testament to how good the criminal justice system is. It's a testament to how bad Title IX is. And so when I say that any independent body could probably do

better than our universities. I really do mean that almost any independent body could do better, assuming they are not aligned with misogyny. We actually seen some states starting to do a version of this, to try it out on a smaller scale to protect those victim advocacy programs that I was talking about. The state of California passed a bill unanimously a couple of years ago. I spoke on behalf of this bill that made campus victim advocates employees of the state, as opposed to employees of individual schools. Obviously, that's much diceier in conservative states where the political sentiments are more hostile to survivors.

But in a state like California, what that allowed was for the state to be able to be the ones to hire and fire victim advocates. They were able to do things like set a standard of how many victim advocates a university should have per student and the types of resources that should be allocated to those spaces. That changed things pretty dramatically from the very beginning of that policy because there were some universities that had pretty robust victim advocacy programs, but there were a lot that had one victim advocate serving all of their students.

So bringing everybody up to an equitable amount of resources was a really significant shift. And then the independence was also really huge because if there are, employed by the university and they're watching the university violate a victim's rights. They weren't allowed to do things like encourage litigation against the university. But in the California bill, that was one of the things that the representative who introduced it said very specifically was something that this bill should do. If rights are being violated, an independent victim advocacy office can help a survivor sue their school to get connected to a pro bono lawyer to file a complaint with the Department of Education.

obviously a lot of this would work a lot better if we had a federal government that was invested in protecting our civil rights. But even in the absence of that, there's still a lot of other stuff that we can do on a more local level if we have those independent agents. The other thing that I always like to add

at the end of this question is just that a lot of these solutions are not complicated and that when it feels overwhelming to make the system from scratch, I want to be as clear as I possibly can to say that it would probably be simpler than people think.

There's a scholar, her name is Jackie Cruz, and she terms the Title IX process as orchestrating complexity, where they would create complexity where there is none to justify their inaction. And I just find that frame really comforting when we think about imagining something better. So many of these cases that I got to review during my year at Western University were not at all complicated, that any average person would be able to know what happened, understand the stakes, and have some pretty good guesses at the types of things they could do to help a survivor. All of the complexity had been added in by a system

that wanted to do nothing and make everyone feel morally justified while they did nothing. And so the idea of starting from scratch at independent agencies who wouldn't have these conflicts of interest, who wouldn't have histories of discrimination like our universities do,

it makes me feel incredibly hopeful. I think it would be a lot easier of a task than anyone listening probably thinks right now. After years of doing this research and meeting with hundreds, if not thousands of survivors, what gives you hope? One of the things that gives me hope is that people who haven't thought much about this issue

tend to be outraged by it. And I know that's sort of a weird thing to say, and it's different than what I would have said a year ago when I was doing interviews when the book came out. But what it's taught me is that there is the sense of justice and injustice within us, that we apply to so many other things that we can leverage to get our responses to sexual violence closer to where they need to be. One of the things that was really vexing in my work for On the Wrong Side is that you had all these people who on paper should be

experts. All of the Title IX staff had received specialized training around sexual violence, but what they've been trained to do was protect perpetrators. And that's a big problem. But it gives me some hope that it takes training. It gives me some hope that it is a systematic effort that is required to get people to betray survivors on this way. When people who are sort of fresh to thinking about sexual violence, and it's not something that's interfered with their life that much, when those people have read my book, they are outraged.

And it makes me feel like if we can just get ahead of it, we could change things really quickly. When I was finishing the fieldwork for On the Wrong Side, I was on the wrong side, I was obviously exhausted. There was certainly some vicarious trauma as the result of this project. More from the institutional betrayals than from hearing about the violence itself. I always think that's important to clarify. And people would say to me, are you just so depressed all the time? Do you think that sexual violence is now just a part of human nature? And you think it's just an impossible problem to solve? And I said, no, I am feeling the heaviness of the project. But the thing that's heavy is that I can tell it doesn't have to be this way. And that the solutions to

end sexual violence in our institutions are at our fingertips. We know what they are. It's not unsolvable. The issue we're running into is that the people in positions of power are very often perpetrators or enablers of perpetrators themselves and they're standing in our way. But the rest of us, we're incredibly clear-minded on what we need to do. And if we could change the powers at B, which is not an easy thing to do, but I think we could end sexual violence in our whole society within a generation. I genuinely believe that.

And that gives me a lot of hope that even with all the barriers they're trying to put in our way, we ultimately will be the ones who can create a safe society. I think it's a possible thing to have. And I think it connects us more to our humanity

when we move closer to that project. When I'm feeling depressed about things, it makes me feel better that the people who are the freshest, their initial inclination is to be on the right side and that it takes learning to be on the wrong side. Education is certainly power. How can listeners, advocates, faculty, how can we all contribute to this positive change? The number one thing that I think that everybody should do is think about the positions of power they hold and how they can leverage that power to help survivors. When I say this, a lot of people where their head goes to is how do I punish a perpetrator?

how do I exact accountability in some form on a perpetrator? And that is not the same thing as helping survivors. I heard a lot from survivors about the people who made them feel supported, the people who helped them stay in school and complete their educations, which is not a small task when you're experiencing institutional betrayal. And they would talk about just the simplest of things that they needed from other people that sometimes they could get from other people. And so what I would want all the listeners to do is to think of those types of things

they could offer. So these are things like when a student went to a professor because they were falling behind in class, because the traumatic impact of everything that was happening was too hard, and also because the Title IX process just interferes in your schooling. They'll expect you to be there for an investigation during a final exam, and they will ask you to just miss out on your educational opportunities. When that would happen to survivors, and they would go to faculty, some of the professors would say things like the thing you missed was a journal assignment. It's worth less than 1% of your grade. I'm going to waive that and I'm going to take that burden off of you as a form of essentially a reparation for the burden that the institution has put on you around this Title IX investigation.

Since they've given you one, I'm going to take one off. I think about that a lot as something we can do in so many different ways that a lot of the time when survivors ask for help, they're told no because it's just not the way things are currently done. But there's so many ways where we can just say yes. Thinking outside of a college, because I know a lot of listeners probably aren't faculty at a university, I would think about things like if someone is being stocked and coming into work at 9 a.m. on the dot every day is the time when they are most likely to encounter their perpetrator because their perpetrator knows they're going to be there, letting them work remote, letting them have flexible start and stop times for their day, letting them have a little bit more autonomy and control

so that they can handle the violence in the best way that they know how, instead of you being the barrier to them. That's really at the core of it. When you're thinking of a formula of how to do this, it is about looking at the burdens that are in your power to take them away. And it's about giving survivors autonomy and control, trusting that they know what will work best for them. And studies find that survivors tend to be right when they think about those types of things.

It's really simple and it's more of a framework than like a here's a one, two, three things that you can do exactly where you are right now. And then in terms of a simple thing that everybody could do right now that would just be helpful is the entire support system that survivors have depended on for safety for decades is being dismantled by the huge defunding of places like rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters, these independent spaces where survivors can go to for help. A lot of them are closing their doors. And so one of the things that you can do, especially when you're saying, I don't know what to do. Find one in your local community, not a national one, one that is specific to the organizations within your community. And if you have some money to send their

way, please do. Thank you so much. We'll be sure to link to your book on the wrong side, how universities protect perpetrators and brave survivors of sexual violence in the episode notes. Where else can people follow you and the work that you do? I'm on blue sky at at N. Bedera, B-E-D-E-R-A, And then I also just have my personal website, Nicole Bedera.com. I'm very open to receiving messages. And if you work within an organization and you really do want to be able to make that organization safer, more resilient to perpetrators to keep them from getting in and hurting people, I do work with a group called Beyond Compliance Consulting.

And we love to work with people who really actually want a violence-free organization. So if that's you, we'd really love to hear from you. Thank you so, so much for your time. Thank you for having me. this was wonderful. Next time, on something was wrong. I had decided to study theater my second semester of school. Cato, who was the person that abused me,

was the first person in the department that I met at all. He was inappropriate with all of his students, truthfully, especially like his female students. But with me, whenever he wasn't being paternal towards me, he was really angry. He asked, did you get an email from Title IX? he asserted that Morgan was trying to destroy his life. Rihanna told me that she had really, really bad news and that she didn't know how to say it.

I asked her if it had to do with Cato. I told Rihanna, we have to report this. And that's when I got introduced to UCO's Title IX office. It has completely eroded my sense of trust and my love for something that was a crucial part of me and such a big dream and goal. 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. Chessler, 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 artists' 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.