Dr. Nicole Bedera

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 inside 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.

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.