Dr. Nicole Bedera

It turns reporting to the Title IX office into a war of attrition.

You spend months or years trying to get from one end to the other, and you ultimately don't have the power to get that outcome you want anyway.

It's still up to the discretion of the school.

Absolutely.

I'm just gonna be really honest with you.

There is nobody who can tell you what an informal process is.

There is not an expert who can tell you definitively what it is because it is intended to be ambiguous to give the university ultimate discretion in what they want to do.

A little bit of history is helpful here.

So if we go back to the Obama era of Title IX, one of the things that was required by the Department of Education was that universities could not handle sexual violence, including some component of penetration, so anything involving a rape, that they couldn't use any kind of informal process.

The reason it was prohibited was because when universities are permitted to do this informally, they tend to do nothing.

They tend to shuffle around a bunch of papers, waste the survivor's time, often make a lot of victim blaming, minimizing or controlling comments along the way that hurt the survivor more.

And then ultimately they do nothing to the perpetrator.

And that's the way things were operating when schools had complete discretion over how they wanted to handle things informally.

Today, under the Trump administration's regulation, the only thing that's written in the regulation about what an informal resolution is, is that it has to be voluntary by all parties, which means that even the perpetrator can drop out at any time and then it's over.

And it can't be punitive.

The definition of punitive is something we can quibble over quite a lot.

If I were defining what punitive would be, it would be something like expulsion.

It would be something that's a formal disciplinary proceeding as defined by the university.

But the way that a lot of schools are defining punitive is an inconvenience.

For example, one of the things that was considered punitive and could not be done through an informal resolution at Western University was