Dr. Nicole Bedera

They'll ask you if there's anybody else who can verify your claims, anybody else who can provide evidence of what took place.

They'll do the same with the perpetrator.

And then at the end of it, they'll decide whether or not they have enough evidence that the violence happened.

And if they do, then they're supposed to discipline the perpetrator.

So these are completely different pathways.

Ultimately, the thing I would say to a survivor is that if you want any kind of an outcome that will keep them at a physical distance from you, your only real option is a formal investigation and it still might not work.

If you want your perpetrator's behavior to change in any way, you have no option except a formal investigation because the restrictions around informal resolution are so significant that you can't meaningfully involve a perpetrator.

If the thing you want does not involve a perpetrator at all, there is a very small chance you can do it informally.

If you wanted something like a training about the available resources for faculty in your department because you don't like the way they reacted to you when you said you were sexually assaulted, that's something that maybe your school might be able to do with informal resolution.

But it's such a complicated system.

The issue is that every school does it so differently.

For anybody who works at a school who might be listening to this, one of the things I would say that every school should do, and something that I think survivor activists should ask for, that parents should ask for, is the list of available remedies for an informal resolution should be written out.

I developed a concept of fragmenting violence to describe this thing that Title IX staff would do.

It's when they would receive multiple concerns about a single perpetrator.

And sometimes that would come from one victim who had been hurt so many different ways by one perpetrator.

And sometimes it would come from many victims who had been hurt by the same serial perpetrator.

But the Title IX office, what they would do instead of thinking about all these cases together or as a collective, which we see more commonly in the criminal and civil justice systems, is they would separate them all off individually and say that any evidence given to one case probably couldn't be used in another case.

If you were to hear this story or if you were to look at it in a newspaper and you hear the story of a serial perpetrator who's hurt so many different victims so many different ways, we all look at it and say, how could anyone possibly let this go on?

If they know this is happening, how could they look the other way when there's so much violence from so many different directions?

But what the university would do was say, well, we're only going to look at one piece at a time.