New Book Highlights Systemic Problems in the Title IX Office

In Nicole Bedera’s new book, On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence (University of California Press, 2024), the Title IX consultant and sexual violence researcher investigates the nation’s Title IX offices through the lens of one public university, which she gives the pseudonym Western University. Her findings, drawn from interviews with various university constituents and her analysis of hundreds of documents, are shocking: Almost no student who experienced sexual harassment or assault received institutional support. And many had their educational journeys derailed, choosing to remove themselves from college, class or other situations to avoid the perpetrators.

Throughout the book, Bedera breaks down the structures at Western that led to such outcomes, ultimately concluding that the university was working against victims’ interests at every point in the Title IX process. “Ultimately, I observed a system designed to benefit (white, straight, cisgender) men, even when they were the ones in the wrong,” she writes in the introduction.

The academic year she spent at Western, 2018–19, was the same year that former president Donald Trump’s Title IX rule was released, and she believes the needle hasn’t moved since then. In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, which has been edited for length and clarity, Bedera discussed her findings and where Title IX stands today, more than half a decade since she began her research.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about how you set this up? It seems like even given anonymity, many universities would be resistant to do something like this. How did you get on the inside?

A: When I was trying to find a school to do this, the first place I went was my alma mater. I was told, “Absolutely not.” I thought about doing it at my current institution, which at the time was University of Michigan—I was told, “Absolutely not.” So, I went to this group of victim advocates I used to work with, who were spread everywhere, and said, “Do any of you think that your school might be willing to participate in this?” And one of them said yes.

The [first] barrier was the victim advocacy office itself. It was understaffed and underresourced, which led a lot of victims to feel guilty. There weren’t enough resources on campus dedicated to campus sexual violence … so they felt like if they moved forward, they were taking something away from someone else.”

—Nicole Bedera

I think part of why that school was willing was they had a brand-new Title IX coordinator who had never worked in higher education before. She had worked mostly in more public-facing offices [and] was used to oversight in her role, so it just didn’t strike her as unusual the way that it would for a lot of Title IX coordinators that were used to the sort of unique norms of the Title IX office. The person who I knew went to the Title IX office and said, “This would be a great way to turn over a new leaf between some of the historical tensions between our two different offices, and I think it’d be great for us to have an outsider come and just get everybody’s perspective on what’s going on in our Title IX system.” And the school said yes.

Q: You break the book down into a few different points in the Title IX process where students face barriers and obstacles. Could you explain those and why you decided to organize the book this way?

A: What I really thought about when I was writing the book and putting the chapters in order is, where did victims who were trying to come forward fall off the process? The first place where they fell off was in the victim advocacy office, most of the time. That’s where students went first, which makes sense; victim advocacy is a confidential office, and so it’s the one place on campus where they can go to ask questions about what will happen if they report, where a report can’t take off without their consent. So, that’s where I started: When they come to victim advocacy feeling like they’re pretty sure they want to report, why are they not reporting? Why are they changing their minds?

That’s the first barrier, and the barrier was the victim advocacy office itself. It was understaffed and underresourced, which led a lot of victims to feel guilty. There weren’t enough resources on campus dedicated to campus sexual violence … so they felt like if they moved forward, they were taking something away from someone else. They would also get a window into how hard the process was going to be. They learned a lot about what their perpetrator’s rights would be if they moved forward, which often made them feel guilty or like they were punishing their perpetrator, which wasn’t their intention. They got a glimpse into the school’s ideology of how Title IX works and what it’s for, and when it didn’t match their personal ideologies of why they were coming forward, they would often voluntarily withdraw.

Q: What barriers exist for survivors further in the process?

A: For victims that did decide to report, you had this next barrier, which is now something in the Biden administration’s Title IX regulation: Schools make this distinction between reports and complaints, and they don’t really advertise to students that there’s a difference. So, students would make reports and then they would never hear anything back, because from a school perspective, they’re not required to take action after a report … [Victims] weren’t told that they needed to file a complaint as well.

Then, there were victims who did know about complaints, and they were trying to decide whether to come forward or not … They had to decide between an informal resolution or a formal investigation, and they would have trouble understanding those differences, and so they would sometimes leave the decision up to the school … Or they would be afraid about retaliation, and the school didn’t have anything to protect the victims from retaliation in any real way, and so they would be scared off and intimidated out of continuing their investigations.

All of these barriers meant that for the most part, formal investigations weren’t really happening at this school … if you laid out the Title IX process in a diagram, from beginning to end, there are barriers at every single step, and there are many survivors falling off of the process at every single step. By the end, we’re talking about a handful of cases per year that are investigated.

Q: Why is it that some of these flaws with the Title IX process, like investigations taking an extremely long time, exist? How do they benefit universities?

A: I think the best way to understand why these cases take such a long time is to look at the outcome. For cases that are investigated, the most common outcome is that the perpetrator has already left campus, and then the Title IX office says that they actually don’t need to make a decision, that it’s not timely anymore. If they push these cases and sort of kick them down the road for long enough, they can remain completely neutral, and they don’t really have to take a side.

Mind you, that is taking a side: It’s taking the side of the perpetrator … and what that means is asking the survivor to put their education on hold a lot of the time. In some of these cases, the perpetrators are so violent and the risk of life-threatening violence is so severe—especially in cases of intimate partner violence—that the victim will withdraw from school for the duration of the investigation because it’s not safe for them to be on campus. In some of those cases, it can be two years that they’re waiting to return to campus.

There was a real sense that the only person who had anything at stake in a Title IX complaint was the accused, because that is what the Title IX office is making a decision about: What to do to the accused. Do they remain on campus or not? But the implicit reason that victims are coming forward is because they are having a really hard time staying on campus while they’re interacting with their perpetrator and encountering their perpetrator on a regular basis. A lot of victims are reporting because the only way they believe they’ll be able to complete their degrees is if they can have campus back to themselves again.

Q: Do you feel the Biden regulations address any of the concerns that are raised in this book about the barriers survivors face when trying to continue accessing their education after experiencing sexual violence?

A: If anything, I worry that they might exacerbate them. The Biden regulations are kind of a compromise between the Obama-era approach and the Trump-era approach, and neither of those approaches were doing enough to make this process safe for survivors to engage in.

I think that’s a real failing, because we’ve just sort of accepted that the victim will be the one to leave, the one to sacrifice their educational opportunities.”

—Nicole Bedera

Any compromise between those two approaches is sort of missing the underlying issue, which is that when victims are going through the Title IX process, they’re being re-traumatized, they’re not getting the help they need and their academics are suffering more … I think that we need a much more sweeping reform of how we manage Title IX that’s really focused on making sure that the Title IX process itself is compliant with Title IX law.

For the most controversial components of Title IX, the Biden administration has allowed schools to make their own decision. They can choose if they want to have hearings or not. They can choose whether they want to use preponderance of the evidence or a clear and convincing standard of evidence. This actually intensifies the problems I’m talking about in the book, where, if you were a student going to report to your campus that you were sexually assaulted, you can’t know anything about what’s going to happen next unless you get that information from your school.

I will say that there are a few components of the Biden administration’s regulation that I think moved in the wrong direction, even more so than the Trump protection. So, for example, the Trump administration still carved out room to put perpetrators on an interim suspension. It was at their discretion, and schools did not choose to exercise it for the most part, but if there was someone who was under investigation, who they thought it was unsafe to remain on campus, or they thought it would be hard for the victims to have their perpetrator on campus while this case was going on, something like that, they could put them on an interim suspension. The Biden administration doesn’t allow that anymore; they set a much higher bar for emergency removal … I think that’s a real failing, because we’ve just sort of accepted that the victim will be the one to leave, the victim will be the one to sacrifice their educational opportunities.

Q: Are there any other takeaways you drew from your research that we haven’t touched on yet?

A: One of the things I found most shocking is, our schools aren’t just schools, especially when we’re talking about universities. The decisions that are made, they impact a survivor’s education, yes, but also sometimes their employment, if that’s on campus. If they live on campus, it can affect their housing. If it affects their housing, it can affect their meal plan … I’d read the research before I went into the field, specifically Know Your IX’s report, “The Cost of Reporting,” and I’d read that there were victims whose lives were unraveling in these really big ways. But to witness it for myself was really stunning.