The debate over campus sexual violence is more heated than ever, but hardly anyone knows what actually happens inside Title IX offices. On the Wrong Side provides the first comprehensive account of the inner workings of the secretive Title IX system. Drawing on a yearlong study of survivors, perpetrators, and the administrators who oversaw their cases, sociologist Nicole Bedera exposes the structures that predictably punish survivors who come forward in the service of protecting—or even rewarding—their perpetrators. In doing so, she reveals that the system tasked with ending gender inequality on campus only intensifies it, upending survivors’ lives and threatening the degrees that brought them to college in the first place.
Dr. Nicole Bedera is a sociologist and cofounder of the antiviolence consulting practice Beyond Compliance. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan. She has spent more than a decade studying sexual violence and advocating for survivors in media outlets including the New York Times, NPR, and Harper’s BAZAAR.
What motivated you to write On the Wrong Side?
I used to be a hospital victim advocate. In that role, I saw firsthand how the criminal justice system (and the medical system) exacerbates the traumas of sexual violence and teaches survivors to blame themselves for institutionally inflicted suffering. When I saw the same processes playing out in the Title IX system as a graduate student, I knew I wanted to study it. I wrote this book to validate the experiences of survivors and help them cut through the institutional gaslighting that has made sexual violence even more damaging. I also hope it will help activists push for radical changes to the Title IX system.
Why does anyone who cares about sexual violence, victim support, and gender equality need to read your book?
Sexual violence is an ordinary, predictable, and devastating part of college for women and queer, transgender, and nonbinary people. But it shouldn’t be. It also has huge ramifications both on and off campus. Sexual assault history is one of the best-known predictors of a woman’s college GPA and capacity to graduate. Survivors are particularly unlikely to finish degrees in male-dominated programs like STEM. This means gender-based violence has a significant ripple effect on other gender inequities like the wage gap and occupational segregation.
It isn’t necessarily the violence itself that deprives survivors of opportunities, however. It’s the way victims are treated by the people around them, including professors who fail to accommodate their needs and Title IX administrators who privilege perpetrators’ educations over those of the women they harmed.
This book is a story of an institution (Title IX) creating lifelong gender disparities—even though it is the very one tasked with fostering gender equality.
I do not treat campus sexual violence as inevitable, and I believe we could eradicate it within my lifetime.
Nicole Bedera
What will readers be most surprised to learn about the Title IX process?
It’s so unpredictable and contradictory. In one case, text messages will be the reason a perpetrator is vindicated. In another, a survivor will be told that texts are never considered high-quality evidence. The rules are applied differently to different people. Specifically, women are held to a higher standard than men, resulting in a Title IX process that is itself discriminating on the basis of gender.
I was also stunned by how many of the excuses schools give for why their campuses are unsafe are transparently false. There is this mythology that schools want to do better, but that their hands are tied—by budgets, by lawsuits, by government regulations, by due process—but as I investigated the justifications each administrator gave me, I found that they quickly fell apart. Schools have more power to do the right thing than they want us to believe.
Others have looked at Title IX and campus sexual assault. What does your book do differently?
I examined the notoriously secretive Title IX system myself, and I studied survivors, perpetrators, and school administrators simultaneously. Unsurprisingly, the story that emerged was substantially different from others that rely on secondhand accounts or focus primarily on one group.
I also did everything I could to make the book easy to read. This book is trauma informed. There are no graphic descriptions of rapes. The survivors are treated as people, not evidence. Victims are never blamed for problems caused by their perpetrators or their school.
I know the book is still upsetting—enraging, mostly—but it’s also hopeful. I give many different examples of concrete (and often, surprisingly simple) shifts that would make a huge difference for survivors. I do not treat campus sexual violence as inevitable, and I believe we could eradicate it within my lifetime.