Dr. Nicole Bedera

There are all of these different options a survivor can take, but it would take an expert, and there are very few, to sit down with a survivor and say, for the outcome you want, you have to take a left here, a right here, then another right, then another left.

And if you turn any other way, it's not going to work out.

So to give you an example, if you were trying to report a sexual assault to your university, I always hesitate to say that this will happen in every single case, but for most universities, reports don't do anything at all.

Once they receive a report that a sexual assault has happened, they have discretion about whether or not to start moving it through the Title IX system.

But for the most part, they treat the report as the end of the path.

For the book, I interviewed all of these survivors

who reported to Title IX and then they were just waiting and waiting and waiting to hopefully hear back.

They were checking their emails with so much anxiety for months.

Every time they heard a notification on their phone, they would be worried that it was Title IX.

They would describe this moment of temporary relief that it wasn't.

And then the frustration and more worries setting in to say, oh, this is not anywhere near over yet.

And then eventually they give up when they didn't hear anything.

Instead, if you wanted Title IX to do something about what you told them had happened, you had to file a different form called a complaint.

And the complaint and the report forms are essentially identical.

On Western University's website, the top of the report form actually said file a complaint.

You know, you can't really begrudge anybody who would struggle to figure out where you should go because I, as an expert on Title IX, doing this research for a year, it took me six months to figure out where the correct form was online for a complaint.

The preferable way that you would file a complaint is that you would go in person

Two, not the victim advocacy office, because they wouldn't have the capacity to tell these things apart.

Actually, a victim advocate asked me when I was asking about the difference between reports and complaints.

She said, I don't know.