When Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was passed by Congress 52 years ago, the measure was meant to stop sex-based bias at all colleges and universities that receive federal money. Feminists saw it as a major victory, one that was strengthened eight years later when sexual violence was explicitly recognized as a form of legally prohibited discrimination.
But a half century later, there is little cause for celebration.
As sociologist Nicole Bedera writes in On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence, sexual violence remains “a normal feature of life on campus,” with rape, sexual harassment, stalking, and physical and psychological abuse currently experienced by one in five female students.
So what happened? How did a law intended to ensure that women have equal access to a college education fail so miserably?
Rape, sexual harassment, stalking, and physical and psychological abuse are currently experienced by one in five female students.
Bedera spent the 2018–19 academic year on a large, public university campus — she never discloses its name or location — and interviewed 24 administrators, counselors, advocates and staffers charged with overseeing Title IX complaints. She also interviewed 45 survivors and perpetrators and read approximately 700 emails and documents pertinent to sexual violence on campus and in the larger community.
What she discovered is both jarring and enraging. And while her findings center only on a place she calls “Western University,” she stresses that Western is not anomalous, but is instead representative of a culture that blames women for the violence against them, protects men who commit that violence, and prioritizes maintaining the school’s reputation at the expense of survivors. Keeping donations and applications flowing, she writes, is always a front-and-center goal.
Add in opaque procedures that make filing complaints difficult — and that differentiate formal and informal complaints without making the distinction clear — complicates the reporting process and frustrates survivors, many of whom feel pressured to drop out of school or transfer instead of seeking justice.
But exactly what justice might look like remains murky.
On the Wrong Side does a masterful job of describing the roadblocks that derail survivors from challenging their abusers. And while reforms are mentioned — including the expulsion and suspension of violators and using state workers, rather than college employees, to adjudicate complaints — this seems insufficient. After all, does removing a rapist or sexual predator from campus ensure that he does not repeat the behavior somewhere else or even understands what he did wrong?
To her credit, Bedera writes that neither she nor the survivors she interviewed want to see more police on campus, but we also know that restorative justice — certainly one possible solution — requires the survivor to repeatedly relive the assault as the process unfolds, something that many resist. This leaves the big question — how to force perpetrators to reckon with what they’re accused of — largely unaddressed. Bedera does not think this matters as long as they’re removed form campus. I’m not as sure.
That said, On the Wrong Side is immensely valuable, casting a spotlight on the procedural inadequacies that prop up violators. “Nothing about the process is fair,” Bedera writes. “Western University offered systemic advantages to perpetrators before investigations began, ensuring that no survivor could enter the Title IX process on an even playing field. … No amount of evidence — of which there was plenty — was enough for survivors to come up on top.”
Bedera writes that despite #MeToo and reams of documentation about the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses, the ubiquity of institutional betrayal makes it clear that this is a feature, rather than a bug, of Title IX adjudication procedures.
This is where sexism comes into sharp focus, she explains, with the elevation of male-over-female value simply assumed by those in charge of adjudicating complaints. Despite a veneer of institutional “neutrality,” Bedera writes that she found numerous policies that were intended to “disrupt the process if a powerful perpetrator — perhaps a star athlete, a legacy student from a donor family, or the child of a renowned professor — comes too close to a ‘responsible’ finding.”
In concert with the belief that a reprimand or dismissal would “ruin a promising young man’s life,” Bedera found a slew of accommodations that help the accused. “The administration’s focus was on the perpetrator,” she writes, as if “it was always a tragedy to deprive a perpetrator of the future he dreamed for himself.”
Western administrators helped at least one man transfer to another school without his transcript indicating that he had been expelled for violently assaulting a female peer. Others had low grades expunged or were retroactively withdrawn from classes they’d failed.
But perhaps most shocking is Bedera’s report of what happens to female survivors after they file an abuse report: Each interviewee confessed that she felt diminished by the school’s Title IX procedures and the hoops she was expected to navigate to complete an incident report. “Their traumatic symptoms deepened,” Bedera writes. “Their mental and physical health deteriorated. Their bank accounts dwindled. Their support systems faltered. The threats to their safety intensified. Their options for future recourse narrowed. Importantly, their schoolwork suffered, even though the Title IX process was supposed to be specifically designed to protect it.”
It’s a horrifying result that left the women in Bedera’s study shaken, scarred and scared. Worse, Bedera writes that despite #MeToo and reams of documentation about the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses, the ubiquity of institutional betrayal makes it clear that this is a feature, rather than a bug, of Title IX adjudication procedures at Western U and beyond.
“At the core of Title IX laws is the belief that a survivor’s education is worth protecting,” Bedera writes. Most would agree that this is vitally important. But creating a world without interpersonal violence means looking at patriarchy, misogyny and the belief systems that blame women for provoking violence and that expect men to dominate. This, of course, extends far beyond Title IX and what happens on campuses. Perhaps that’s why so little headway has been made in eroding it.
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On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence
By Nicole Bedera
University of California Press
