Dr. Nicole Bedera

Would you mind telling me when you find out?

It's just a testament to how dysfunctional the system is.

But ideally, you would go to someone in the Title IX office, you would tell them what happened to you, and then they would decide at their, again, their discretion whether or not to offer you a complaint form.

If you pick option A, that means that everything is over and the school will do nothing.

If you pick option B, it might move forward if someone else thinks it's a good idea.

And then if you pick option C, they're going to push around a bunch of paperwork for a while and it ultimately will still end some way or another.

And the way that administrators would justify this, they thought it was a very good system.

And I think that's something people need to understand.

It's not that the system is broken and everybody knows it's broken.

What they said was that it gave survivors more choices and that they would be able to choose what they wanted, that they could choose to end the Title IX process at any time.

But it's only a choice if you know what the stakes are of the decisions you're making.

If you're really just poking around in the dark until you happen to find the right thing, you're not making a choice.

What I found is that just this first hurdle we talked about between filing a report versus a complaint knocked out 80% of reports made to the Title IX office.

There was a public report from the University of Michigan from 2017 or 2018, where they go through the trajectory of every report they received to the Title IX office, and how many of them by the end turned into investigations that had some kind of an outcome, how many ended in a sanction, all of those things are listed.

If you live in the states of...

new york or maryland or you're just curious about those states it's publicly required that schools share this information online it's something you can look up and what you'll see is that at all of these junctures there are just huge amounts of survivors falling off and so similar to what i saw only about 20 percent of these cases make it past that complaint threshold and then at the university of michigan by the end of the year they only had four cases that year

that ended in any kind of a sanction that would discipline the perpetrator in any way.

None of those sanctions were expulsions.

They were mostly things like probation, which was really to go through this whole process to just receive a warning.

It's such a long process for survivors.