Something Was Wrong

S25 Ep4: Institutional Betrayal: How Title IX Fails Survivors with Dr. Nicole Bedera

January 26, 2026

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  • The system of handling sexual violence in universities is fundamentally oppressive, designed to strip survivors of social status and re-traumatize them, rather than being merely broken. 
  • Universities often engage in 'symbolic compliance,' using advertising and superficial efforts to appear safe and compliant with civil rights law while their internal processes are toothless or actively harmful to survivors. 
  • Administrators frequently exhibit 'himpathy' and misunderstandings about survivor behavior, prioritizing the protection of perpetrators—often using gender as a proxy for power—over holding them accountable. 
  • Sexual violence is classified under Title IX as sex discrimination because it negatively impacts survivors' education, a dynamic historically reinforced by faculty retaliation against those supporting victims. 
  • The current Title IX system is fundamentally designed to be dysfunctional, protect perpetrators, and punish survivors, necessitating a complete overhaul, ideally toward an independent, survivor-centered system to eliminate conflicts of interest. 
  • The most effective immediate actions listeners can take involve leveraging their personal positions of power to remove burdens from survivors (like academic flexibility) and financially supporting independent, local rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters. 

Segments

Early Career and NYT Piece
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(00:02:41)
  • Key Takeaway: Dr. Bedera’s initial New York Times opinion piece was written in response to the Trump administration’s draft changes to Title IX handling of sexual assault on campus.
  • Summary: Dr. Nicole Bedera received her PhD from the University of Michigan and co-founded the consulting practice Beyond Compliance. Her first major media feature was an opinion piece in the New York Times following the Trump administration’s proposed reversal of Obama-era Title IX enforcement. This early public engagement led to significant harassment, including emails from professors urging her to defend perpetrators.
Advocacy Inspiring Research
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(00:06:06)
  • Key Takeaway: The oppressive and re-traumatizing nature of the system, observed while working as a hospital victim advocate, motivated Dr. Bedera to pursue research instead of practice.
  • Summary: As a hospital advocate, Dr. Bedera witnessed survivors immediately internalizing blame and questioning why the system treated them with suspicion rather than protection. She realized the system was operating exactly as designed to oppress victims, prompting her decision to become a researcher to find more accurate answers than the existing academic literature provided. The consistent mistreatment of survivors across different backgrounds shaped her research focus.
Gaining Research Access
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(00:08:49)
  • Key Takeaway: Access to conduct fieldwork for her book at Western University was secured through connections with former victim advocates who had transitioned into university roles, bypassing initial institutional resistance.
  • Summary: Dr. Bedera was warned that securing access to a Title IX office for her dissertation research at the University of Michigan would be impossible due to the critical nature of her work. She gained entry to Western University because a newly hired Title IX coordinator, accustomed to high transparency in previous government roles, did not hesitate to allow the research. However, the Institutional Review Board process took a year, and the coordinator later showed second thoughts about violating institutional norms.
Dismantling the ‘Good School’ Persona
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(00:11:44)
  • Key Takeaway: Universities leverage their legitimacy and positive associations to convince the public they are safe, often engaging in ‘symbolic compliance’ where efforts to adhere to civil rights law are merely symbolic.
  • Summary: The expectation that colleges are safe places is often betrayed when survivors report incidents, revealing that the promised support systems are toothless. Historically, the distribution of rape whistles exemplified a misunderstanding of violence, assuming perpetrators were strangers and that intervention would occur, which is analogous to modern consent trainings that lack follow-through on reporting support. When survivors report, they often find administrators are not trained to help but rather to silence or control disclosures.
Identifying Unsafe Campus Spaces
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(00:18:33)
  • Key Takeaway: Unsafe campus spaces are characterized by being male-dominated, competitive, hierarchical, and having men privileged at the top, such as fraternities, football teams, or groups exhibiting a ‘glass escalator’ effect.
  • Summary: Sociologists identify high-risk environments by the presence of competition, hierarchy, and male privilege at the apex, exemplified by sports teams or groups like marching bands where gender stereotypes dictate roles. To make an organization safer, one must reduce competition, minimize power disparities, and ensure equitable treatment for gender-marginalized individuals. Institutional betrayal exacerbates trauma through actions like making reporting difficult or failing to value survivors within the space.
Weaponized Misunderstandings of Survivors
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(00:22:19)
  • Key Takeaway: Administrators often possess a naive understanding of sexual violence, preferring candidates who believe rape myths, and they frequently employ ‘himpathy’ to justify avoiding accountability for perpetrators.
  • Summary: Schools often hire administrators who believe violence is limited to stranger assaults, showing surprise when cases involve acquaintances. A key misunderstanding is the application of ‘himpathy,’ where administrators express excessive empathy for perpetrators, often rationalizing inaction by stating, ‘One life is already ruined, why ruin two?’ This reflects the belief that a survivor’s life is permanently damaged, whereas the perpetrator remains fully intact, ignoring the high likelihood of survivor recovery with proper support.
Illusionary Support Pathways
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(00:26:33)
  • Key Takeaway: Title IX processes create illusionary pathways, such as the distinction between a ‘report’ and a ‘complaint,’ which function as dead ends designed to exhaust survivors and allow the university to claim credit for offering options.
  • Summary: The Title IX system is structured like a maze where only an expert knows the single path to a desired outcome; otherwise, survivors face frustrating dead ends. For instance, filing a ‘report’ often ends the process, requiring survivors to file an identical-looking ‘complaint’ form to proceed, a distinction that knocked out 80% of cases at the University of Michigan. Administrators justify this complexity by claiming it offers survivors ‘choice,’ but this choice is meaningless without understanding the stakes.
Informal Resolution Ambiguity
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(00:32:07)
  • Key Takeaway: Informal resolutions are intentionally ambiguous, often resulting in inaction, as they must be voluntary and non-punitive, leading schools to refuse basic protective measures as ‘punitive.’
  • Summary: The definition of an informal resolution is so vague that no expert can definitively explain it, granting the university ultimate discretion. The Trump administration’s regulation allows perpetrators to drop out at any time, and schools define ‘punitive’ narrowly, sometimes refusing to schedule separate library times for a victim and perpetrator as being too punitive for the accused. Formal investigation remains the only viable option if a survivor seeks physical distance from the perpetrator.
Fragmenting Violence by Perpetrator
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(00:40:25)
  • Key Takeaway: Title IX offices engage in ‘fragmenting violence’ by treating multiple concerns about a single serial perpetrator as separate, easily dismissible individual cases rather than a collective pattern of abuse.
  • Summary: Fragmenting violence describes the practice where Title IX staff separate multiple concerns about one perpetrator, often refusing to use evidence from one case in another. This fragmentation allows prolific perpetrators to continue harming others because the office only assesses if there is enough evidence for one small piece of the overall pattern. This systemic fragmentation benefits perpetrators by obscuring the scope of their actions.
Gendered Protection of Perpetrators
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(00:42:04)
  • Key Takeaway: Universities protect perpetrators because they view them as valuable institutional assets, and this protection is overwhelmingly gendered, as schools side with the accused man even when the roles are reversed.
  • Summary: The protection of perpetrators is fundamentally gendered; if the roles are reversed (male complainant, female respondent), the school tends to side with the man. Administrators are willing to take on significant legal risk to protect perpetrators deemed valuable, such as star athletes or donor children, because gender is used as the primary proxy for power. The expectation that perpetrators have more legal rights than survivors is false; rather, universities accept violating survivors’ civil rights without accountability.
Faculty Complicity and Retaliation
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(00:45:03)
  • Key Takeaway: Faculty complicity is widespread, as many internalize the idea that holding someone accountable for sexual assault is inherently harmful to the perpetrator, leading them to support the accused when known.
  • Summary: The common societal belief that ‘we all think rape is wrong until we know the perpetrator’ is starkly reflected within institutions, where many faculty quickly take the perpetrator’s side, even if they know the victim. Faculty intervention to support a known perpetrator can constitute a profound institutional betrayal by denying victims access to educational opportunities, such as letters of recommendation or comfortable classroom attendance. This behavior stems from the internalized belief that accountability constitutes harm to the perpetrator.
Traumatic Procedural Steps
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(00:48:15)
  • Key Takeaway: Cross-examination is a uniquely traumatic procedural step in campus Title IX hearings, intentionally designed to trigger survivors and render their testimony ineffective, a feature unique to educational institutions.
  • Summary: While all institutional betrayals cause trauma, cross-examination is a distinct dagger because it is predictable and hits survivors all at once, unlike diffuse inactions like being ignored after filing a report. Cross-examination is ineffective for finding the truth and was reintroduced under the Trump administration’s regulation specifically to traumatize survivors. Furthermore, the regulation mandates that if a survivor skips the hearing, all their prior evidence, including confessions from the perpetrator, is cleared from the record, disadvantaging the survivor while rewarding the perpetrator’s absence.
Faculty Retaliation and Title IX History
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(01:01:12)
  • Key Takeaway: Faculty hostility in Title IX cases negatively impacts survivors’ education by denying access to educational opportunities and recommendations.
  • Summary: Hostility from faculty can target students supporting survivors, using educational power to deny access to classes, office hours, or letters of recommendation. Title IX was legally classified as gender discrimination following the Alexander v. Yale (1980) case, where friends of victims were included because faculty lowered educational quality for all women on campus due to harassment concerns. This power disparity makes it difficult for victims to secure timely removal of perpetrators or new instruction, derailing entire educations.
Reforming the Dysfunctional Title IX System
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(01:03:44)
  • Key Takeaway: The entire Title IX system requires fundamental revision, with an independent entity being the most crucial structural reform to eliminate institutional conflicts of interest.
  • Summary: There is no quick fix for Title IX as the system is designed to protect perpetrators; the entire structure needs revision. Victim advocacy offices, a positive development from the Obama administration, are currently being dismantled and should be preserved and strengthened. An independent entity, legally required to be aware of process changes, could create a more survivor-centered system, as current university experts are laden with conflicts of interest.
Title IX vs. Criminal Justice Accountability
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(01:05:57)
  • Key Takeaway: The Title IX system produces more institutional betrayal and fewer accountability actions than the criminal justice system.
  • Summary: The Title IX system is demonstrably worse than the criminal justice system in terms of accountability, though this does not attest to the criminal justice system’s quality. Independent bodies could likely perform better, provided they are not aligned with misogyny. California’s unanimous bill, which made campus victim advocates state employees, is an example of a successful local structural change, allowing advocates to encourage litigation against violating universities.
Simplifying Complexity and Finding Hope
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(01:08:28)
  • Key Takeaway: The complexity often seen in Title IX cases is frequently an orchestrated mechanism used by institutions to justify inaction.
  • Summary: Solutions to institutional sexual violence are often simpler than perceived, contrasting with scholar Jackie Cruz’s term ‘orchestrating complexity’ used to justify inaction. The heaviness felt by researchers stems from knowing that solutions are readily available but blocked by those in power who enable perpetrators. The hope lies in the fact that people’s initial inclination is toward justice, and it takes systematic training to compel experts to betray survivors.
Actionable Support for Survivors
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(01:12:42)
  • Key Takeaway: The primary contribution everyone can make is leveraging their power to remove burdens from survivors, focusing on support rather than perpetrator punishment.
  • Summary: Listeners should focus on how to help survivors complete their education, such as waiving minor academic requirements when trauma or Title IX interference causes missed work, viewing this as a form of reparation. For those outside academia, this means offering flexibility, like remote work or adjusted hours, to help individuals manage stalking or violence safely. Supporting local rape crisis centers and shelters, which are facing defunding, is a simple, immediate action everyone can take.